Merino Wool Is a Performance Fiber
Merino keeps a sheep cool through a New Zealand summer and warm through its winter. It can do the same for you. It regulates temperature across a range no synthetic can touch, it manages moisture so effectively that odor-causing bacteria can't establish, and at 17.5 micron it's fine enough to sit against your skin all day without a hint of itch.
Everything you want from a base layer, merino already does. Naturally.
So when merino underperforms — when it sags, pills, wets out, or wears through — that is not the fiber failing you. That is the yarn failing the fiber. Conventional spinning takes a material with extraordinary natural properties and systematically strips them out.
Nuyarn® is what happens when you stop doing that. It's the technology behind our entire REEL MERINO collection, and it exists for one reason: to let merino wool perform as close as possible to the way it does in nature.
Spinning Merino Wool Twists the Life Out of It
There are two conventional ways to spin merino yarn, and both of them work by force.
- Ring spinning — wool fibers are twisted around each other into a rope-like structure.
- Core spinning — twisted wool fibers are wound around a core filament.
Both techniques compress the natural air pockets out of the wool, induce stress into the fiber, create loops, and restrict the fibers' ability to move. What you get is a rope. Ropes are strong. They are also dense, inflexible, and capable of being genuinely itchy against skin.
And the twist creates a second problem, deeper in. The fibers are wound so tightly that the inner ones can't reach your body vapor at all — the entire moisture load falls on the outermost fibers. Once those saturate, the moisture gets trapped inside the yarn, where it can't escape. Slower drying. Added weight. And a warm, wet interior where odor-causing bacteria are finally able to grow.
Merino's reputation for being delicate, slow-drying, and easily worn out was built on a spinning method. Not on the wool.
Nuyarn® Solves the Problem of Conventional Spinning
Nuyarn® does not twist the fibers. It drafts them.
Merino fibers are drafted along a high-performance filament — first in the S direction, then neutral, then in the Z direction, in a two-ply configuration. No twist is introduced over the length of the fiber. The result is a two-ply yarn with enormously more volume, aeration, and durability than anything conventional spinning can produce.
It sounds simple. Nobody else is doing it.
It is not ring spun. It is not core spun. Nuyarn® is twist-free spinning — the first meaningful change to the way wool is spun in roughly two hundred years. And every natural property that the twist was crushing out of the wool is suddenly, finally, available.
How Does Nuyarn® Merino Stack Up?
The Martindale test is the standard measure of abrasion resistance. A fabric sample is mounted and rubbed against a standardized abradant at a set force, checked every 5,000 cycles, and the test ends when the yarn breaks or the sample is destroyed.
The higher the number of rubs, the tougher the fabric.
What Do the Numbers in REEL MERINO Mean?
120. 145. The number in the product name is the fabric's weight in grams per square meter (gsm) — the weight of a one-by-one meter square of the fabric. Lower is lighter. Our REEL MERINO 120 LT is built for cool-to-hot conditions and layers under everything. The REEL MERINO 145 is a heavier base or mid layer for cold-to-cool days.
17.5 Micron. This is the diameter of an individual wool fiber. The lower the number, the finer and softer the fiber feels against skin. At 17.5 micron, our New Zealand merino is as fine as cashmere.
For scale: a human hair is roughly 100 microns.
Less Wool. Less Water. Less Everything.
Nuyarn® uses 30% less resources and 25% less energy than conventional spinning to make a fabric that outperforms it on every axis.
The efficiency is structural. Because the twist-free yarn is a two-ply construction 35% finer than single ply, it takes less wool to reach the same fabric weight — and less wool means less water and less dye moving through the entire supply chain behind it.
Then the garment reaches you, and the savings keep going. Merino is naturally odor-resistant, so you launder it far less often. And Nuyarn® is 8.8× more durable, so you replace it far less often than that.
Durability is sustainability. Everything else is a rounding error.
Our REEL MERINO collection is Responsible Wool Standard certified, spun on a Bluesign® approved system, and blended with plant-based and recycled nylon filament.
85% More Stretch. Not a Thread of Spandex.
For decades, the industry's answer to stretch has been elastane. It works, briefly. Elastane also absorbs around 2.5 times its own weight in water, because it has almost no capacity to manage moisture. And it degrades — losing its ability to return to shape through laundering and exposure to ultraviolet light. Garments sag. Cuffs go slack. The stretch you paid for leaves before the garment does.
Nuyarn® simply lets the merino fibers move. Untwisted, they can shift, extend, and recover on their own — 85% more elasticity than conventional merino, with 100% recovery to original shape.
No elastane. No degradation from washing or sunlight. The stretch is a property of the yarn, and it lasts exactly as long as the garment does.
Nuyarn® Collection
