Seal International is based at Ladywell Mills in Bradford. The company sources animal fibres from all over the world, such as mohair, cashmere, alpaca, silk, bison, angora, camel hair, yak and vicuña. These raw materials are sorted, tested, blended, combed, and prepared for spinning into yarn. Much of this yarn is used by fellow members of the SIL Group, who process these raw fibes into finished cloth and fabrics at sites across Bradford and other parts of the UK

We’re currently at Ladywell Mills, based just outside the centre of Bradford. We start off with the raw fibres which are based on this site here. That was the foundation of the group Seal International. From that process we spin out into the rest of the group, split across several different sites and businesses.

We have have a yarn dyer in Scotland, and we have a piece dyer, Roberts at Keighley. We have a yarns business, NBA Yarns. Then we get more into the traditional weaving, which is what Bradford is synonymous for. We have multiple brands. John Foster, which is over 250 years old. William Halstead, over 200 years old. We have Joshua Ellis, which is over 375 years old.

We are the curators of a number of truly historic brands within the textile industry. And then we have the likes of Abbotsford Textiles, which are commercial fabrics for office trade. and also we supply a lot of fabrics for internal furnishings for the Ministry of Defence and BAE systems, for various warships and nuclear submarines.

A lot of our customers tend to be the world’s catwalk brands, high end fashion brands. They are obviously expecting very exacting standards. We run a lot of the traditional old looms, in some cases the looms are 50 to 100 years plus, because of the techniques we’re seeking to achieve. But likewise, we’ve just invested in a brand new Jacquard loom because clients are starting to ask for Jacquard fabrics. So from our perspective, while preserving the knowledge and the experience and the history of the past, we are also very much invested in the future of the industry.

Whether that’s machinery, or whether that’s staff or people. We are preserving the craftsmanship that’s passed down, quite often through two or three family generations who still work with us. We’ve got a very keen apprentice program, I think for us it’s about attracting more people into textiles and telling the story of textiles to the world.

We supply most, if not all, of the world’s high end luxury fashion brands, those who you regularly see on the catwalks of Milan, New York, Paris, and London too. I think the reason why we have so many high profile, high end customers is the quality of the workmanship and the craftspeople. The raw materials are of the highest quality but the team we have, many have been with the business for years. So I think really I’d probably put it down to the skill of the workforce, the investment in the machinery and the knowledge and experience of the management team of running a productive mill.

I work on the brand and marketing side of the business, for the full group of companies, which is from raw fibres to yarns, dyeing and to the manufacture of the cloth. I’ve worked in textiles since I started my career. I did a degree in fashion and that obviously led me to designing. So I was a designer for quite a few years and then slowly got into marketing.

People everywhere come to Bradford as it’s renowned, isn’t it, for textiles? It’s the quality, the craftsmanship that the people of Bradford can put into it, because it’s been learned over generations. Families passing those skills down. Bradford is the home of textiles. I think it always has been. I think that the quality of cloth that comes out of Bradford is something else.

Seal International is a speciality fibre processer in Bradford. We source specialty animal fibres, such as alpaca, mohair, cashmere, camel and other fibre types.  We obtain them in a raw state, get them washed and processed into a usable form for the next process, which is spinning. I’m an apprentice trained speciality fibre sorter. I started at 16, I’ve now got 40 years experience so I know my fibre types. Quality is based on fibre length, fibre diametre, fibre colour, and we sort fibres into particular processes and blends going forward. That’s my role.

For every fibre type we’ve bought, we’ve got a purchase sample and a production sample which we’ll keep for the best part of 30 years. So you can go back and replicate each particular lot based on what you, the customer, bought before. So if someone’s produced some scarves five years ago we can provide the same quality of fibre we did five years down the line.

I examine the sample by hand, to get a good feel of what the sample is going to be. First of all, you look at color because colour is a big indication on whether the animal has been well treated. Then you look at fibre strength, whether the animal has had a good diet, it should have a protein inside called keratin. If it loses that keratin it’ll have a weak point, which is no good because when you twist and spin, you’ll get fibre breakage. You’ll then do a length test. So when we’ve got a scoured sample of camel hair and we comb it, we’ll know roughly what percentage of top (the longer fibres) we’ll get out which goes to spinning and what percentage of noil (the shorter fibres) we’re going to get out, which then goes for another process.