Collection: Jo Cranston

Jo is a designer and producer of pure lambswool accessories for men & women, made entirely in Britain.

Designing begins in Jo's Brighton studio, working from photographs and drawings, developing colour palettes, yarn wraps and knitted samples.
It is also where she has been researching the impact her business is having on the ecosystem and planning how to improve sustainability. Some things have not changed since she's began over 25 years ago, for example she has always produced her collections in small batches: this helps to minimise waste. Her accessories are made from pure wool and unlike fossil fuel based fibres that are polluting the sea, wool is a natural fibre that is renewable and completely biodegradable. She buys the majority of her wool from mills that supply natural lamb’s wool, sourced from farms where animal welfare is a high priority and the practice of mulesing sheep is not used.

Jo only works with British factories: specialists in spinning and knitting with a long heritage of producing luxury lambswool yarns and accessories.
Most of her yarn is dyed and spun at a mill situated on the banks of a loch in Scotland. This is where the lamb’s wool is washed using the pure water from the loch, creating a luxuriously soft handle to the finished pieces. Only environmentally friendly dyes that conform to European REACH standards are used, allowing water from the dyeing process to be cleaned and returned to the Loch, an RSPB nature reserve monitored by SEPA (Scottish Environmental Protection Agency)

Once the yarn has been dyed and spun, it is sent to the knitting mills for production. The mills she works with are ethically run with high standards for staff, frequently audited and linked to SEDEX. Jo works with their talented knitwear technicians using ‘wholegarment’ knitting machines to make the collections. This is known as ‘no waste’ production that produces knitwear without any need for sewing seams, which in turn reduces manufacturing time, energy consumption and wasteful off-cuts.