Questions about the wool we use? Here are some answers.
Questions about the wool used in our wool mattresses?
Find answers to your questions below:
Frequently asked questions about wool
Respect for animals is fundamental to the way we make traditional mattresses and forms part of our commitments.
We work only with farmers who protect their sheep’s welfare through outdoor grazing, small flocks, no treatments during rearing and similar practices.
Shearing is essential to a sheep’s health and well-being.
Wool is one of the few animal-derived materials whose removal benefits the animal, because a sheep’s fleece does not shed naturally. Shearing helps sheep stay healthy:
Here are two reasons why sheep need to be shorn:
1 – Modern domestic sheep grow wool continuously.
Texel sheep, which provide the wool used to make your mattresses, are shorn once a year. Their particularly thick fleeces contain locks more than 15 cm long. Without shearing, the sheep would be weighed down by their own fleece.
2 – Beyond the weight, a sheep with a full, unshorn fleece would become far too hot despite wool’s remarkable thermoregulating properties. Shearing in spring therefore makes the year ahead more comfortable.
Sheep therefore need to be shorn once a year.
Experienced, skilled professionals carry out the shearing without an industrial production-line approach, ensuring the animals remain as comfortable as possible.
The wool used to make our mattresses comes exclusively from one particular sheep breed: the Texel.
Not every sheep breed produces wool suitable for high-quality filling. Texel fibers are long and have excellent loft, making them ideal for a comfortable mattress.
At shearing time, this sheep has fleece locks averaging 15 cm, much longer than those of other sheep breeds found in France.
Texel wool has ideal characteristics for excellent sleeping comfort, particularly its length, thickness, volume and springiness, also known as resilience.
For bedding, wool must have loft, resilience and hold its shape.
By nature, the fiber from this particular sheep would produce felt or yarn that is too coarse. As mattress wool, however, its incomparable loft creates the gentle surface feel that is essential for the body.
Carefully selected, high-quality wool is the source of the benefits of wool mattresses.
Our wool mainly comes from the valleys of the Allier department.
The collection area extends to the Massif Central.
It comes from diverse small-scale farms.
It comes from farms where sheep graze outdoors all year. The resulting animal welfare and balanced diet contribute to the wool’s quality.
We source our wool through a short supply chain.
While some manufacturers favor long supply chains to reduce costs, we have worked to shorten ours so that we can offer higher-quality materials.
The benefits of a short value chain are numerous.
For our mattress filling, we favor wool described as:
– “virgin”: untreated and unwoven wool, shorn exclusively from live sheep and never recycled.
– “full fleece”: an entire fleece without the less suitable parts.
Our wool is not certified organic, mainly because of the cost of certification, even though wool is inherently a natural, eco-friendly fiber.
There is a contradiction in that!
Our farmers were already using these natural methods long before such certification existed.
The sheep’s living conditions and diet, their treatment and the collection of their wool all show the greatest respect for animal welfare and the environment, while providing us with excellent filling wool.
These conditions are essential to producing high-quality wool.
Certification for both raw materials and finished products would increase our prices. Among other things, that would run counter to our commitment to inclusion and our aim of making handmade, natural bedding made in France increasingly accessible.
Finally, thanks to a direct, local and short supply chain and trusted relationships with our suppliers, our wool is among the best available for traditional mattresses.
Consumer health and the environment in which we live remain our primary considerations.
In short, this approach prioritizes value for money in the finished product for bedding use.
It is also worth noting that an ethical label is not necessarily a quality label.
That does not mean that we are against labels.
The fact that so many people ask about this shows that the subject should not be overlooked. We believe it is right to give as complete an answer as possible, because buying this type of mattress is a commitment for many years.
We have, in fact, received several certifications and awards. We do our best!
The shepherds and shearers we work with do not practice mulesing.
Texel sheep are seldom subjected to this practice because they have no folds around their hindquarters.
Such folds encourage fly larvae to proliferate, which is why mulesing became widespread in the first place.
Mulesing is a preventive surgical procedure in which skin is removed from around a sheep’s tail.
More generally, mulesing is no longer practiced in Europe. It has been banned in New Zealand since 2018 but is still practiced in Australia.
The procedure is intended to prevent myiasis, in which fly larvae develop beneath the skin, because moist skin folds provide ideal places for parasites to lay their eggs.
Myiasis endangers the sheep’s health and can cause death if the problem is not treated.
Thorough spring shearing also provides an opportunity to assess the health of every sheep in a flock.
Other hygiene solutions for sheep are in place to remove the need for mulesing in sheep farming.
For a new mattress, NO!
To make a Le Briand wool mattress, we use only virgin wool that has never previously been used, processed or woven.
When we receive it at the workshops, it has just been washed. We carry out the carding ourselves.
Fresh wool is preferable to recycled wool because it is more resilient and of higher quality.
As we see when refurbishing some mattresses, recycled wool may be worn out. You can feel the difference: it has lost its resilience and can be very dusty.
Sometimes we cannot determine the origin of the wool used, whether it comes from sheep or other animal species.
In the past, people sometimes made their own mattresses and filled them with whatever materials were available.
For a wool mattress refurbishment, however, we reuse the wool from your own mattress. We remove it, card it again, remove the dust and use it to make your refurbished mattress.
If the wool has lost some of its loft, we often need to add a few kilograms of new wool to restore its resilience.
The ticking will be new and chosen by you.
Collect wool from breeders and cooperatives.
Carefully sort the wool by breed, fineness and length, removing overly straw-like wool, droppings and kemp fibers, and separating black wool. This step is carried out by hand.
Pack the sorted wool into jute bales.
It is the second major transformation stage before making the wool mattress.
The wool-washing steps are as follows:
First, the fleeces pass through an opening machine fitted with a toothed roller. This removes a substantial amount of plant matter.
The wool then enters a feeder and moves onto a toothed conveyor, which controls the speed and thickness of the layer entering the first washing tank.
The wool then moves through five water tanks, each fitted with a submerging mechanism and a wringer.
The water is kept at about 60°C. Cleaner water from the final tank is reused in the first tank.
At the end of the washing process, the wastewater is treated at a water-treatment facility.
The wastewater contains only soil, plant matter and animal grease, with no chemical products.
The wool then passes through a dryer.
Suction carries the wool to another machine, which opens the washed fibers again and removes very short fibers, remaining dust and plant matter.
Finally, the washed wool is packed into bales using a baling press.
The washing process is slow because French wool naturally contains a great deal of grease.
It also contains a large amount of plant matter and therefore requires thorough scouring.
Wool is a naturally occurring fiber, making a wool mattress a healthy choice.
It is therefore important that no process before use alters this natural character.
Our wool supplier has the same requirement.
The wool is therefore washed without chemical treatment.
We use the following products during washing:
which are chemicals!
Sodium carbonate (Na₂CO₃) is a salt formed from carbonic acid (H₂CO₃) and sodium (Na⁺).
It is a naturally occurring alkaline salt, distinct from baking soda and caustic soda.
It comes from a natural mineral: natrite.
Sodium carbonate is naturally occurring and moderately alkaline, making it suitable for washing natural wool fibers without damaging them.
It helps preserve the fiber’s biological integrity without altering its “natural DNA.”
Before washing, our supplier sorts the wool.
It is the first major transformation stage before making the wool mattress.
The wool is collected from farmers and cooperatives.
Sort the wool by breed, fineness and length, removing overly straw-like wool, droppings and kemp fibers, and separating black wool.
Pack the sorted wool into jute bales.