KLAUS Steger, the managing director of the world’s largest worsted wool spinning company, Suedwolle, believes the changed world economy calls for a new global strategy for marketing wool.
His German group's model of a global wool company has been built in response to an evolving world economy
A trip to Australia has given Klaus Steger a rare chance to visit his blue ribbon Western District grazing property in Victoria, a property he bought in 2002 to gain a clearer insight into the production of wool.
The showcase property, Mount Hesse, Winchelsea, runs 20,000 Merino sheep in good years – the last of the crossbred ewes having been offloaded last year after their calculations showed wool as having superior returns.
A trip to Australia gives Klaus Steger a rare chance to visit his blue ribbon Western District grazing property in Victoria, a property he bought in 2002 to gain a clearer insight into the production of wool.
The showcase property, Mount Hesse, Winchelsea, runs 20,000 Merino sheep in good years – the last of the crossbred ewes having been offloaded last year after their calculations showed wool as having superior returns.
But while he’s adamant that Merino sheep and the wool they produce have a profitable future, the global financial crises, and the conscientious consumer spending it created, has hit his business hard.
The only way to recover consumer interest, he says, is to take a global approach to marketing wool.
Talking to Mr Steger about the wool industry often elicits a lesson in globalisation.
Klaus Steger has been the driver behind relocating Suedwolle’s manufacturing business from Germany to China, for instance.
Indeed, under his control Suedwolle has diversified to having three wool brands, offices scattered across Europe and China and a business structure that adheres to a strict code of environmental best practice.
But Mr Steger is less interested in talking about the way individual wool companies have operated as he is about the need for a global collective approach to marketing wool.
“When the past International Wool Secretariat (IWS) hammered the wool message into the consciousness of consumers they did a good a job,” Mr Steger told Rural Press on a visit to Australia last week.
“But after the disappearance of the wool pricing system they (formerly The Woolmark Company) were accused of not spending money effectively but, as I remember it, they were never asked to spend it effectively.”
The result of ceasing this persistent wool campaign, he says, was that wool marketing has effectively been dead for the past two decades.
And while wool slipped out of the picture “man-made fibres kept up their marketing efforts”.
The legacy, he says, is that everybody knows about the attributes of polyester and viscose, but not about those of wool.
“Australian Wool Innovation (AWI) is cautiously restarting but it takes a very long time to bring back wool into the consciousnesses of consumers,” Mr Steger said.
Managing director of Suedwolle for 20 years, he has long argued the need for constant generic marketing of wool, that globalisation has changed the way business is done, that a fractured international wool community cannot continue.
In the wake of the global credit crisis, he reasons that there has never been a more urgent time than now to build up confidence at the retail level.
“The efforts that are going on are not working,” he says.
“We are all struggling and we need to somehow get a body that involves everyone - personally I think this should be the goal of the industry.”
Mr Steger says he put this to the new AWI board when it was elected last year but the response he was given was not one that agreed with his sentiment.
Mr Steger maintains the only way producers are ever going to get better returns for their product is by educating today’s consumers about the benefits of wool and its renewable, natural and performance qualities.
Giving brands and retailers the confidence that consumers will buy wool and then getting wool on the store shelf is the objective.
”Consumers only buy what they find on the shelf,” he says simply.
With the world’s fashion and retail houses tightening their belts, more and more wool insiders, and processors, have been spruiking the same views.
As the new chief executive of The Australian Wool Innovation, Brenda McGahan, recently said: “It’s time to light the fire of consumers.”
UK processor Laurence Modiano, could have been quoting Mr Steger, when he, too, argued for a marketing campaign which made a wool “front of mind again”.
“No other fibre comes close to wool – it’s so full of elegance, quality and technical superiority, technical performance and above all beauty,” he says.
“We owe it to ourselves to do everything we can to make the world that is so ignorant to it, aware of this again.”
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