At its Summer Convention, CCA Global Partners, partnering with the Just Shorn people of New Zealand, launched a wool program that seeks to bring this natural fiber into Main Street. Wool in the U.S. has a market share in the range of 2%, and as far as I can tell it’s seen by most consumers as the highest-quality fiber in the carpet category. There’s no question that some of the most beautiful products in this industry are made with wool. Consumers for the most part walk in the front door of floor covering stores not thinking that they want to buy the absolute cheapest product in the store; they walk in with the idea of ending up with a beautiful room and a floor that will make their friends green with envy.
Given that, it’s somewhat puzzling that after all these years the category has achieved no more than this 2% level. Certainly the perception of wool as overly expensive will drive a sizable amount of potential buyers from even looking at products made with the fiber. But subtracting that group from the total number of customers that walk into floor covering stores in any given year, and it would seem to me that it if these people were actually exposed to wool fabrics and had a chance to hear the story, I couldn’t imagine that wool couldn’t eek out a share somewhere north of a paltry 2%.