Manteco® Materials
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Samsøe Samsøe x Manteco®
For half a decade, we have been working with Manteco®, a Tuscany-based wool manufacturer who is providing us with innovative fabrics to craft our seasonal outerwear from. In Tuscany, near Prato, they create their own take on recycled wool, the signature MWool® – for which they use the company’s special Recype® dyeing process – as well as virgin wool fabrics. In our journey towards the use of a majority share of certified, more responsible, and preferred materials in our collections, Manteco® is a strong partner due to our shared values and vision – helping us to move towards the goals we have outlined in our Materials Strategy. Furthermore, much like us, Manteco® strongly believes in the full traceability of their fabrics, using their own MSystem®, a network of traceable, transparent, and zero-mile expert textile businesses and artisans, and MTrace® software to record every single step of production processes down to the smallest detail: from raw material sourcing to spinning, from coning to warping, from weaving to finishing.
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We want to offer a journey behind the scenes of the production of these fibres and fabrics. For this, we begin at Manteco®'s factory.
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Here, we explore the entire journey of their recycled wool from selection to sorting, shredding, colour creation – all the way to the final weaving.
Collection and sorting of post-consumer clothing
All of the pre- and post-consumer garments that Manteco® receives are first sorted and checked for quality.
The clothing is then divided and sorted by colour and composition, before it eventually begins its journey towards a second life, undergoing the removal of any non-recyclable elements. Besides post-consumer waste, Manteco® also incorporates production waste from within its own supply chain.
The garments which have defects and can’t go onto the second-hand market are shredded with a mechanical shredding machine to be turned into recycled wool fibres.
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Shredding and mixing colours
In this phase, the garments and scraps which have been carefully cleaned and divided by colour and composition are processed with a mechanical shredding machine.
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Colour creation
At the Manteco® lab, during the phase called blending, the recycled wool fabric’s final colour is brought to life. When it comes to creating colours in wool recycling, no additional dye is needed, since the ‘new’ fibers are carefully pre-selected. As a consequence, the colour creation happens through the combination of differently coloured fibres without the use of additional dyes or chemicals. This is done by the so-called Feltrinisti, raw material artisans who create colour ‘recipes’, to be used again and again.
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Yarn spinning
After the colour creation, big bales of recycled wool fibres are sent to the spinning mill – all within proximity of the Manteco® factory in Tuscany. At the spinning mill, the raw material is processed – or carded – to produce fibres that can then be spun into yarn. After this, in the warping phase, the yarns are prepared for weaving.
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Weaving
The final fabrics are created on the weaving mill, using a weaving process that interlaces warp and weft threads on a loom. The final fabric is sent to a finishing mill, for final processing and treatment, to give the fabric the final look and feel.