Victoria's Secret

Victoria's Secret has a flag-ship store in New York City's Herald Square. Ragg is a sturdy wool fibre made into yarn and used in many rugged applications like gloves. The company gained notoriety in the 1990s after it began to use supermodels in their advertising and fashion shows; prominent supermodels featured by Victoria's Secret include Alessandra Ambrosio, Tyra Banks, Ana Beatriz Barros, Gisele Bündchen, Naomi Campbell, Laetitia Casta, Eva Herzigova, Adriana Lima, Karolina Kurkova, Petra Nemcova, Frederique van der Wal, Heidi Klum and Tricia Helfer. This process was invented in the Heavy Woollen District of West Yorkshire and created a micro-economy in this area for many years. Victoria's Secret products are also available through the catalogue business, Victoria's Secret Direct, with sales of approximately US$870 million. Such yarns are typically used as weft yarns with a cotton warp. All stores of Limited Brands are corporately owned. The recycled wool may be mixed with raw wool, wool noil, or another fibre such as cotton to increase the average fibre length.

Victoria's Secret had sales of more than US$ 2.4 billion through their 900 retail stores in the United States in 2005. As this process makes the wool fibres shorter, the remanufactured fabric is inferior to the original. Raymond eventually committed suicide in 1993, jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. To make shoddy, existing wool fabric is cut or torn apart and respun. Since the takeover the company has been based in Columbus, Ohio though it has at times sought to foster an image of being British. Shoddy is recycled or remanufactured wool. The company was founded in San Francisco, California, USA in 1977 by Roy Raymond, who sold it in 1982 to The Limited Inc., and it is now owned by the successor Limited Brands company. Ancient Greeks lined their helmets with felt and Roman legionnaires used breastplates made of wool felt.

Victoria's Secret is a retail marketer of women's clothing and beauty products, but is most recognizable as a marketer of lingerie. Wool felt covers piano hammers and it is used to absorb odors and noise in heavy machinery and stereo speakers. In addition to clothing, wool has been used for carpeting, felt, and upholstery. (source). These small scale farmers may raise any type of sheep they wish, so the selection of fleeces is quite wide.

There is also a thriving 'home flock' contingent of small scale farmers who raise small hobby flocks of specialty sheep for the handspinning market. In the United States, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado also have large commercial sheep flocks and their mainstay is the Rambouillet (or French Merino). Breeds such as Lincoln and Romney produce coarser fibres and wool of these sheep is usually used for making carpets. Most Australian wool comes from the merino breed.

Australia, China and New Zealand are leading commercial producers of wool. Global wool production is approximately 1.3 million tonnes per annum of which 60% goes into apparel. Australia's colonial economy was based on sheep raising and the Australian wool trade eventually overtook that of the Germans by 1845. German wool—based on sheep of Spanish origin—did not overtake British wool until comparatively late.

Spain allowed export of Merino lambs only with royal permission. In the Renaissance, Medicis of Florence built their wealth and banking system on wool trade with the aid of the Arte della Lana, the wool guild. In 1699 English crown forbade its American colonies to trade wool with anyone else but England itself. The smuggling of wool out of the country, known as owling, was at one time punishable by the cutting off of a hand.

Over the centuries, various British laws controlled the wool trade or required the use of wool even in burials. English wool exports - which bordered on European monopoly - were a significant source of income to the crown. In medieval times, the wool trade was serious business. Prior to invention of shears - probably in the Iron Age - they probably plucked the wool out by hand or by bronze combs.

As the raw material has been readily available since the widespread domestication of sheep and similar animals, the use of wool for clothing and other fabrics dates back to some of the earliest civilizations. . The finer diameters are generally more valuable. The fibre diameter of wool varies from 15 micrometres (superfine merino) to 30 or more micrometres for the coarser wools.

The quality of fleece is determined by a technique known as wool classing, whereby a qualified woolclasser tries to group wools of similar gradings together to maximise the return for the farmer or sheep owner. The latter four are packaged and sold separately. After shearing, the wool is separated into five main categories: fleece (which makes up the vast bulk), pieces, bellies, crutchings and locks. The grease is generally removed for processing by scouring with detergent and alkali.

In this state it can be worked into yarn or knitted into water-resistant mittens, such as those of the Aran Island fishermen. Wool straight off a sheep contains a high level of grease (thus "greasy wool") which contains valuable lanolin. Wool is generally a creamy white colour, although some breeds of sheep produce natural colors such as black, brown (also called moorit) and grey. The relative amounts of kemp to wool vary from breed to breed, and make some fleeces more desirable for spinning, felting or carding into batts for quilts or other insulating products.

On sheep, the hair part of the fleece is called kemp. Hair, by contrast, has little if any scale and no crimp and little ability to bind into yarn. A fine wool like merino may have up to a hundred crimps per inch, where the coarser wools like karakul may have as few as one to two crimps per inch. The amount of crimp corresponds with the fineness of the wool fibres.

Insulation also works both ways; bedouins and tuaregs use wool clothes to keep the heat out. Because of the crimp, wool fabrics have a greater bulk than other textiles and retain air, which causes the product to retain heat. They help the individual fibres attach to each other so that they stay together. Both the scaling and the crimp make it possible to spin and felt the fleece.

Most of the fibre from domestic sheep has two qualities that distinguish it from hair or fur: it has scales which overlap like shingles on a roof and it is crimped; in some fleeces the wool fibres have more than 20 bends per inch. Wool is the fibre produced as the outer coat of sheep. This article deals with the wool produced from domestic sheep. Wool is the fibre derived from the hair of animals of the Caprinae family, principally sheep and goats, but the hair of other mammals such as alpacas may also be called wool.

United States: .77%. South Africa: 1%. Sudan: 2%. India: 2%.

United Kingdom: 2%. Iran: 2%. Turkey: 2%. Argentina: 3%.

New Zealand: 11%. China: 18%. Australia: 25% of global wool clip (475 million kg greasy, 2004/2005).