Kristina, who has worked for massive businesses including Nestlé,
PepsiCo and Rimmel owner Coty, recalls: “I had a great 12-year
career. My last account, within a team, was the Tesco account with
Premier Food – worth £320 milllion. That gave me the grounding and
conidence to step up and run my own business, as I always aspired to.”
She took time during her maternity leave after having her son
Oliver, now 10, to research running her own business. Daughter
Sophia followed a year later, and in 2011 Kristina gave up her full-
time job to concentrate on wool. “From a lifestyle point of view the
corporate world was great, but you did leave on a Monday and come
back on a Thursday, which wasn’t really conducive to having a
family,” she says. “I felt I had gained enough conidence to do this, and
with Paul’s enthusiasm for the farm it seemed like an obvious area to
go into – such a great opportunity.”
Romney sheep have been grazing the Romney Marsh area since
the 13th century, and the Boulden family farm has just over 1,
breeding ewes along with a mixed farm of crops and cereal, plus
60 Saxony Merino sheep. Romneys are particularly suited to the
damp, marshy conditions because they don’t sufer so much from
foot rot. The sheep produce ive to six tonnes of wool each year,
but when it started in 2008 Romney Marsh Wools was only able
to process runs of around 100kg. Today that has grown to a tonne,
with the rest of the leece going to British Wool, formerly known as
the British Wool Marketing Board.
Kristina started out working with Roger Poulson of Curlew
Weavers in Camarthenshire, who washes, cards and spins her leece
in his woollen mill, then weaves it on one of three Victorian looms he
uses. “It is a ive to six-month process, but Roger has been weaving for
30 years and the products he produces are wonderful,” Kristina says.
“We looked around this area, but there are no mills in Kent,”
she says. “Mills are traditionally in Wales, Yorkshire, Scotland
and Ireland. We then looked at what it would cost to set up a mill
on the Romney Marsh, and it was something ridiculous like £
million – and then we would have had to get a set of skilled people
and leece throughput as well.” She decided to focus on Romney
Marsh Wools as a British farmer and work with skilled craftspeople
already operating in the UK, as locally as possible. Now production
is so much larger, some of the wool is processed in mills in
Huddersield as well as in Camarthenshire.
The history of wool production in the British Isles is very
important to Kristina, who believes the market is on an upswing
after many decades of decline. “A hundred years ago wool was one
of the most important incomes for this country,” she says. “Most of
the churches were built from the wealth of the woollen industry –
in Romney Marsh there are a lot of churches and it is quite famous
for smuggling, because taxation on wool was so high. In the 1960s
suddenly there were a lot of synthetics on the market. Who wanted
to be standing there hand-washing a woolly jumper when you could
buy a synthetic top you could put in the washing machine?” she asks.
“The way we as consumers eat also changed dramatically. A
hundred years ago to have meat on your plate would be a luxury.
These days you can go into any supermarket and if you wanted to
you could eat meat seven days a week. Wool started to dramatically
decline. Farmers who had large locks of sheep were keeping them
more for meat than for wool. Twenty-ive years ago wool fell so much
through the loor that it was more expensive to shear the sheep than
the return you got for your leece. The importation of ine wools from
Australia and New Zealand impacted it as well.”“I love the idea that nothing from wool needs
to be wasted – sheep really are fabulous”
15