HAWICK CASHMERE have over a century of experience in working with cashmere.

 

The Hawick Hosiery Company was founded in eighteen seventy-four and traded until nineteen-ninety when it was rebranded The Hawick Cashmere Company. Today HAWICK CASHMERE is still based in the original nineteenth century Mill in Hawick, Scotland.

 

As one of the founding members of the Scottish Cashmere Club, they were a driving force behind the creation of the Cashmere Made in Scotland® trade mark and the exacting quality standards that it represents.

 

In the late twentieth century, the development of electronic knitting machine technology radically changed the design possibilities. Previously, designs could only be produced by hand. HAWICK CASHMERE is recognised within the industry as having led the way in employing and improving this new technology - whilst retaining the traditional skills practiced for generations. The result has been the development of the Seamless Garment. This innovation has had as big an impact on the production of high quality knitwear as the first knitting frames did over a century ago.

 

As a privately owned company HAWICK CASHMERE take pride in protecting their reputation as one of the finest producers of cashmere in the world.

Cashmere comes from the fine undercoat of the Hyrcus goat. These extraordinary animals are native to the mountainous regions of Asia and are now primarily found on the frigid plateaus of Mongolia and northern China. Every spring, these goats are combed by hand in order to retrieve the fibres from their undercoats - which are extremely soft and highly insulating. It takes the fibre from many goats to create a single garment.

 

Until the eighteen-seventies, cashmere fibre was arduously hand-separated by the local workforce. It was then that the Scottish manufacturer Joseph Dawson developed a machine that could mechanically perform this delicate work. From the time of his success, Scotland has been synonymous with the highest quality cashmere.

 

Cashmere Made in Scotland® is a guarantee of the world's finest cashmere. Only a small fraction of the harvested fibre is accepted for processing - fibres that are a minimum of 34mm in length and a maximum thickness of 16.5 microns. This produces a yarn of exceptional lightness and softness, and is the starting point of every garment created by HAWICK CASHMERE.

 

Cashmere Made In Scotland® delivers the highest quality cashmere in the world, to meet the specifications of the world’s top designers. 

Quality is at the core of every HAWICK CASHMERE product. Fibre is double tested to make sure it complies with our exacting standards for colour, length, thickness and purity. Only then is the fibre dyed. This is done before the fibre is spun into yarn to produce a softer handle and truer deeper colour.

 

HAWICK CASHMERE utilise both the latest technologies and the vast wealth of experience of their workforce to achieve the best possible results. Many families contain two or three generations who work in the industry, passing down an almost instinctive understanding of the materials and traditional skills necessary to produce the best. In such a tight knit community, outsourcing and its lack of quality control is just not acceptable. State-of-the-art technologies allow us to deliver the most intricate designs. WholeGarment® machinery allows us to eliminate side, shoulder and underarm seams.

 

The results; extraordinary softness, exceptional resilience, lightness, warmth and brilliant colour. Quality that is Guaranteed by the Cashmere Made in Scotland® label, and produced with unparallelled excellence by HAWICK CASHMERE.