A spinning mill built in 1997, as others were closing.

West Yorkshire Spinners is a young company in an old trade. Its limited company was incorporated in January 1997, according to Companies House, which lists its business as the preparation and spinning of textile fibres and its registered office in Keighley, in the Aire Valley north-west of Bradford. The company’s own account gives the same year: it says it was founded in 1997 “in the original home of the British worsted spinning industry,” at a time when many spinning mills were closing because of imported yarn.

Its founders, the company says, wanted to keep the knowledge and skills of the trade from being lost, and saw a gap in the market as natural fibres gave way to synthetics. Setting up a spinning mill “from the ground up” was daunting, it says. The firm describes its origins in “an old Victorian mill in a picturesque village in Yorkshire,” and says it has since moved its factory twice and now works from modern premises with up-to-date textile machinery. It calls itself a family-run business drawing on generations of experience; it does not name its founders on its website, and we have not identified them from other sources.

For much of its early life the mill’s work was not under its own name. The company says it built a reputation for natural-fibre yarns and only in 2012 launched “our own yarn” — Fleece, a 100% Bluefaced Leicester wool — to champion British wool and its heritage. From there it built a range of its own blends with farmers and wool merchants, and with designers who write patterns for its yarns.

British breeds, spun in the Aire Valley.

West Yorkshire Spinners’ brand rests on where its wool comes from and where it is spun. The company says its products are “spun right here in the Aire Valley,” that the majority of its processes — from carding and combing to spinning and dyeing — take place within a 20-mile radius of its facilities in Keighley, and that it dyes both through local dyers and in its own in-house dye plant. It says it develops its blends and colours in-house.

Its sourcing claims are specific. The company says it uses the British Wool licensing scheme for responsibly sourced fleece, supports the Campaign for Wool, and works with farmers on the Falkland Islands and with the Shetland wool broker Jamieson & Smith for some of its fibres. Beyond breed-specific wool it lists Mulberry silk, British alpaca and plant fibres among its materials. Those are the company’s statements; we have not audited its supply chain.

Its choice of lead yarn fitted that story. Bluefaced Leicester is a British longwool breed whose fine, lustrous fleece is popular with hand knitters, so a yarn spun from a single named breed let the company sell provenance as well as colour.

The range is organised into named collections. Its website lists more than a dozen, among them Fleece, the Signature sock and 4ply yarns, ColourLab and The Croft, with pattern collections it says are inspired by the Yorkshire countryside. The yarns are sold through independent yarn shops as well as online.

The trade has noticed. In December 2015 the Keighley News reported that West Yorkshire Spinners had been named best brand for British yarn for the second consecutive year. In 2025 the Finnish broadcaster Yle reported that the Keighley mill already produced part of the yarn of Novita, Finland’s best-known knitting-yarn brand.

British wool and the mills that spin it.

The seven brands in this group all sell British yarn for hand knitting and crochet: West Yorkshire Spinners, John Arbon, Baa Ram Ewe, Blacker Yarns, Laxtons, Uist Wool and Fyberspates. They share a country, but not a way of making yarn, and the difference between them says a good deal about what is left of Britain’s wool industry.

Britain once spun yarn on an industrial scale, and the mills that remain are a small fraction of what there was. Some brands still own the machinery that turns fleece into yarn. Others design yarns and colours and pay a mill — at home or abroad — to spin them, which is how much of the modern yarn trade works. Between the two sit firms that do part of the work themselves, such as dyeing or blending, and buy in the rest. A brand’s label rarely makes clear which kind of company it is.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now and where its yarn is spun and dyed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Keighley mill with a Helsinki owner.

Ownership is documented in the public register. Companies House shows Ernst Magnus Gylfe, a Finnish national, holding 75% or more of the shares from April 2017, and, from 31 March 2025, Novita Group Oy, a Finnish private limited company based in Helsinki, holding 75% or more. Novita’s founding family is named Gylfe; its founder, Ernst Gylfe, set up Helsinki’s first worsted mill in 1928 after training in Bradford, according to Finnish Wikipedia.

The link mattered in Finland. In January 2025 Yle reported that Novita had proposed moving spinning and dyeing from its mill at Koria to a modern spinning mill in West Yorkshire owned by Novita’s owners, which Yle later named as West Yorkshire Spinners. In November 2025 Yle reported that spinning and dyeing would continue at Koria after all. The Keighley mill thus sits inside a Finnish group while selling yarn under its own British brand.

The register also shows change in 2026. A director, Richard Peter Longbottom, left the board on 29 May 2026, according to Companies House, and the company’s accounts for 2024 were filed in July 2026. In October 2026 the company’s website carried a notice that West Yorkshire Spinners Ltd would be unable to process new web orders from 25 September 2026, directing customers to its stockists and promising further updates; on 7 October 2026 Companies House still listed the company as active. We report the notice as the company published it.

For a design guide, West Yorkshire Spinners shows how a contract spinner can turn its own mill and its region into a brand. Compare Novita, its Finnish owner, and Sirdar, another Yorkshire yarn name. For this guide we use moorland green, fleece cream and bracken with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep West Yorkshire Spinners’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.