THE ESCORIAL COMPANY
The Escorial Company Ltd New Zealand was founded in 1998 to protect and promote Escorial, a distinctive, rare fibre and the small sheep it comes from.
Escorial is a special type of curly wool that creates extraordinary fabrics, this unique fibre is only available from The Escorial Company, approximately 20 tonnes of raw fibre is grown each year.
The Escorial Company and maintains its quality and integrity through ownership and management of the secure and transparent supply chain with a direct line of traceability from the Escorial garment back to the farm that grows the fibre.
Due to the small number of flocks and hand selection of the wool each season coupled with a small amount of preferred manufacturing partners; Escorial can swiftly trace garments directly and transparently back to origin.
The Escorial name and trademark stands for sustainability and authenticity and follows through the entire journey. A final garment will either carry the Escorial woven label and/or 100% ESCORIAL or 100% ESCORIAL wool as fibre identification on a content label.
This guarantees that a fabric or garment carrying the Escorial name is genuine, traceable to origin, is naturally grown and comes from a quality-controlled source of supply of integrity and provenance.
A Spanish King with a penchant for tactile pleasures; a New Zealand farmer with a passion for curly heads; an endangered species shipped across the world; a suave man stepping out of a plane in an impeccable suit.
It sounds like a good ripping yarn and so, it is.
For the luxury thread that binds the different elements of this story may soon make cashmere lose its cachet.
Enter Escorial. You have never heard of it?
But you soon will.
Because the name of a 16th century royal Spanish monastery has been given to the sheep that once grazed on its grounds and the springy yarn that is spun from their fleece.
Light as thistledown, soft as pussy willow and with a Lycra-like stretch.
Escorial is being hailed as the revolutionary new natural fibre for the luxury market.
- Suzy Menkes, International Tribune, 1999