How Two Wyoming Women Turned A Hobby Into Largest Wool Mill In The West

BUFFALO — Karen Hostetler had a little idea for a hobby business that’s turned into something much bigger.

Hostetler owns Mountain Meadow Wool, a mill that has grown into the West’s largest, processing premium Wyoming wool and sending it out into the world as custom-crafted products and high-quality yarn.

It all started because she and another friend, who are knitters, decided they wanted to create a store that sold yarns and other products made from Wyoming yarn. Buffalo is, after all, the middle of Basque sheep country. The two didn’t think it’d be difficult at all to start such a store in Buffalo.

It didn’t take long before the two friends got a big reality check.

They bought a bale of Wyoming wool from the Camino Kidd Ranch and were looking for someone to process that wool and turn it into yarn that they could then dye and sell. But no one was processing Wyoming wool for local products. No one at all.

If they wanted yarns made of Wyoming wool they were going to have to figure out a way to do it themselves.

That first year, they took their 400-pound bale of wool to a mill in Canada. That gave them about 200 pounds of white yarn to work with.

“We dyed that in vats and sold it to farmers markets and stuff like that,” Hostetler said.

That was just the beginning. Their homespun idea for Wyoming wool met an eager market of crafters who loved the idea of working with Wyoming wool as much as Hostetler and her friend.

“We found a nice, soft friendly industry,” Hostetler said. “So, we were comfortable with that.”

Ignoring the Critics

But soon Hostetler and her friend discovered something not quite so warm and fuzzy.

Global economics, where the share farmers take home for their commodities seems to get less and less each year amid rising expenses for the goods and services they need, was putting the squeeze on their suppliers.

“It became more and more apparent that the Wyoming wool indutry was kind of fading and faltering,” Hostetler said. “A lot of it had gone away. We don’t produce near what we used to. In the 1960s, it was 20 million pounds. Now we’re down to about 2 million pounds.”

Hostetler and her friend decided they didn’t just want a soft, friendly crafting business that sold a bit of yarn to a few hobbyists. They wanted to do more.

“The big thing was, we needed a way to help them make more money on their fiber so there’s an incentive to keep doing it,” Hostetler said.

Their ideas all took shape from that one principle — a principle very unlike anything most business plans would set.

“People came in and told us, ‘You’re going to fail,’” Hostetler said. “They thought we were kind of nuts. They’d say, ‘Look at all this equipment, like how are you going to run it? Who’s your market?’”

Hostetler and her friend ignored all of that. They focused on writing their grants and learning about the industry so they could figure out just how big they needed to be to begin making an impact for Wyoming wool growers by paying them a premium for their wool.

“We do pay high,” Hostetler said. “We pay a good, fair price, and we try to have a whole protocol with our ranches that bring in fiber.”

Those ranches have to meet certain parameters for the wool, Hostetler said, so the mill can’t accept wool from just any ranch. But the ones they do work with get a premium for the wool, one that’s not necessarily tied to what the commodities market is paying for wool.

“That gives them an incentive to make sure they continue to breed for that, and produce the best possible wool,” Hostetler said.

More Than 54,000 Miles Of Wool

While today they’re the largest wool mill in the West, processing 60,000 pounds of wool annually — more than 54,000 miles of wool — their beginning was much, much smaller.

“When we first started, we made one kind of yarn,” Hostetler said. “We took that to a trade show and we had probably 30 skeins of it.”

It was a beautiful display, but people at the trade show were asking Hostetler questions she didn’t really understand, things like, do you have this in a sport or a DK?

Those are types of yarn, but Hostetler had never heard the terminology before.

“I’m writing down notes saying ‘DK??,’” Hostetler recalled, laughing. “I didn’t even know what that was. We had to go back and really learn a lot about yarn.”

She and her friend started writing grants to open a wool mill, which helped them earn credibility. They even went overseas to tour wool mills and learn more about the industry from the inside.

Eventually, the two found an empty T-shirt factory, lying fallow after the company that owned it closed up shop and moved back to Colorado.

It was the perfect place for a small wool mill, they decided. They convinced their Johnson County Commissioners to apply for a grant through the Wyoming Business Council and buy the building, which they then leased for economic development.

Then it was just a matter of sourcing equipment they could afford and finding people who could run that equipment.

“For a while, it was just three of us running stuff, cleaning equipment and trying to figure out what we were doing,” Hostetler said. “We had one table and a couple of chairs and our laptop. That was our office.”

30-40 New Colors

Today, Mountain Meadow Wool mill buys wool at a premium price from six ranchers in Wyoming.

But they also custom process wool for ranches across America, and they’ve recently set up a new custom dye shop, which can handle up to 90 pounds of yarn per day.

That’s going to mean a lot of new colors coming out this year — 30 to 40 new colors for each of the different types of yarns they make, which are all named after Wyoming cities like Saratoga, Cody, and Jackson.

“Saratoga is a fingering weight,” Hostetler said. “That’s a fine yarn, so you could use that for socks, lacy shawls and things like that. Laramie is a nice, sturdy, chunky worsted yarn. And then Cora is a three-ply.”

The Sheridan is bulky, while Sundance is chunky.

“Cody is just a regular sport weight,” Hostetler said. “Very popular yarn Cody is. We don’t have a yarn called Buffalo, where we’re from, because people would think it was from a buffalo.”

But they do have a bison yarn, which they call Tatanka.

They also make custom products at the mill for ranches, as well as working with the six universities in America that still have sheep and wool programs. That includes University of Wyoming.

One hurdle they’ve faced is American perception of wool. Most people remember wool as that “scratchy” stuff no one wanted to wear because it was too prickly.

But wool doesn’t have to be prickly.

“The scratchiness is because the finest wool went overseas,” Hostetler said. “It would go into the worsted suits market in southern Italy, or sometimes it went to the U.S. military. So the wool that we’re used to had added course fiber to stretch it.”

Those coarse fibers are what made wool so scratchy and undesirable to many in America.

“They call it the prickle factor,” Hostetler said. “Those coarse fibers stick out and they poke. The finer the wool, the more it lays down flat and it doesn’t have that price factor. In fact, some of our yarns feel like cotton. It’s the finer wool and it’s amazing.”

Eliminating the prickle factor is one reason why Hostetler buys only premium wools.

“About 96% of our wool comes from Wyoming,” she said. “We do get some black wool from South Dakota and Idaho. We do get some black wool from Wyoming as well, but we need more of that than Wyoming can produce.”

Farm To Fashion

Hostetler can trace every skein of wool the factory processes back to the ranch it came from. It’s a similar concept as farm to table, but Hostetler calls it farm to fashion.

They’ve also become much, much better at making yarn than they were in the beginning.

“Ten years ago, we got an email from a company in California that said the yarn was bad, very bad yarn,” Hostetler recalled. “It was full of little bits of vegetation and the guy’s knitting machines didn’t like it at all.”

Hostetler has since solved that problem, and now she gets very different kind of emails.

“Last week, I got another one from California which said it was beautiful yarn and just amazing,” Hostetler said. “She said in 19 years she’s never seen an American mill that could make yarn so beautiful.”

Those two emails are going in a picture frame together, Hostetler said, because they show just how far Mountain Meadow Wool Mill has come since she started it in 2007.

Hostetler is slowing down and getting ready to hand the reins of the mill over to her son, Ben Hostetler, who has a master’s degree in environmental engineering.

One off his projects, which he did for a master’s thesis, is a project that takes sludge from the mill’s cleaned wool and composts it into a land amendment.

“He’s kind of an entrepreneur at heart,” Hostetler said. “So, he left his engineering job and joined the mill, and now he pretty much runs it.”

Ben has already tracked down new spinners for the mill from a company in Georgia that has decided to send its operations overseas.

“His goal is to double our production,” Hostetler said. “We have the machinery to do it now. Though we’re getting kind of tight on space.”

As Hostetler peers out over the factory that’s so much larger than what she started, and is poised to get even larger, she is dreamy-eyed.

“There are times when I come out here and look and think, ‘Oh my gosh, how did it get this big? I don’t know how I did that,’” she said.

But she did do it, and glad she did. Because a world without Wyoming wool would be a much colder place to live.

Contact Renee Jean at renee@cowboystatedaily.com

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.