Grown and Sewn in USA
Every Whim merino shirt starts with a sheep in the American West. The wool is raised, sheared, spun, knit, dyed and sewn in the United States, and we know every step between the ranch and the shirt.
The ranches
Our wool is Shaniko wool. It comes from Shaniko Wool Company, a group of ten family ranches across the American West, with ranches in California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming. Each one has been tending sheep continuously for more than 100 years.
Together the ranches raise about 58,000 sheep and produce roughly 600,000 pounds of wool a year. Some flocks are still herded the old way, moving from lower winter country up to high mountain pastures for the summer.
Shaniko was the first U.S. farm group to supply wool certified under the Responsible Wool Standard (RWS), and its wool is double certified under RWS and NATIVA. Both hold the ranches to high standards for the welfare of the sheep and regenerative practices for the land they graze. For the ranchers, this isn't a trend. It's how they produce fine wool while keeping the land healthy for generations.
The wool is fine American merino, 18.5 microns. Nothing is blended in.
The mills
The wool is spun into 1/38 yarn in South Carolina. It is knit into jersey at a family-owned mill in South Carolina that has been making circular knit fabric since 1978. Then it is cut and sewn by hand in the USA.
1/38 is a fine, single-ply yarn. It knits into a light, smooth jersey. The knitting mill is still run by the family that founded it.
Why merino, next to your skin
Merino is nature's technical fabric. Unlike synthetics, it's naturally thermoregulating and anti-bacterial: it wicks sweat and breathes when it's hot, insulates when it's cool, and fights odor on its own. The fine, flexible structure of the fiber gives it a soft hand with none of the itch of coarse wool. It's durable, and fully biodegradable.
Most performance shirts are plastic. Polyester, nylon and acrylic shed tiny fibers as they are worn. One study found that a gram of synthetic clothing releases about 400 microplastic fibers every 20 minutes of use.
Those fibers travel. Snow collected near the summit of Mount Everest, at 27,700 feet, held microplastics made mostly of polyester, acrylic, nylon and polypropylene, the materials of outdoor gear. Scientists are still working out how many microplastic particles are in our bodies, and how to measure them accurately.
Merino is a natural fiber grown by sheep. A golf shirt sits on your skin for four or five hours a round. We think it should be wool.
Does a merino shirt shed microplastics?
No. Our merino shirts are 100% wool, so any fiber they shed is wool, and wool is fully biodegradable.
Is merino too warm for summer golf?
No. Merino is naturally thermoregulating: it wicks sweat and breathes when it's hot, and insulates when it's cool.
Nothing synthetic
Our merino shirts are 100% wool. No plastic against your skin, nothing shed in the wash.
Care
Wash cold and hang dry as needed, or dry clean.