What Chanel wants, Chanel usually gets. So, quelle surprise, when New Zealand sheep farmer Geoff Ross said “non” to the esteemed French luxury house and “yeah” to Australian menswear business MJ Bale.
“We worked with Chanel for a while, but we found them quite secretive,” says Ross, who operates the mountainous 16,500 hectare Lake Hawea Station with his wife Justine, about 100 kilometres from Queenstown. “I don’t know if it was us or if it was them, but they didn’t want to disclose where their wool came from, and they didn’t want us to disclose that we were selling to Chanel.”
“We gently eased out of that.”
Storytelling is important to Lake Hawea Station, the world’s first merino sheep farm to receive a B Corp Certification and New Zealand’s first certified carbon positive farm. With a focus on regenerative farming, providing sanctuary for critically endangered species and animal-centric management of its roughly 10,000 strong flock, the station currently sequesters 2.5 times more carbon than it emits.
It’s a fairytale among the horror stories surrounding fashion industry supply chains and pollution.
Chanel might have been tight-lipped, but it’s a story MJ Bale’s founder Matt Jensen is interested in telling. The menswear outfitter that provided Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with his wedding suit and is the official tailor of the Wallabies rugby team has a long, vocal history of championing Australian wool.
The son of a woolgrower and grazier, Jensen speaks passionately about his relationship with farmers. Since 2015, MJ Bale has worked with the carbon positive-accredited Kingston Farm in Tasmania on suits created entirely from their wool.
The company returns a percentage of every Kingston suit sale to the farm, to be reinvested into projects that enhance local biodiversity and the natural values, a relationship that will be extended across the ditch to Lake Hawea Station in New Zealand.
“For us, it all started with farms in Armidale, New South Wales,” says Jensen, who founded MJ Bale in 2009. “It continued with Simon Cameron at Kingston. It’s a closed circle relationship where we give back. It’s a real partnership.”
“I like doing this because I grew up around it, but it’s more than that. There are a lot of farmers, but good farmers are hard to find. Being a good farmer means delivering high-quality merino fibre and having the right practices. We feel that give the products true provenance.”
In his search for good farmers, Jensen was introduced to the Ross family, and a new relationship and collection took shape.
On the surface, the products are another evolution in MJ Bale’s style journey away from structured spring racing staples and groomsman gear to six rakish suits, with five in a fluid flannel worthy of a modern-day flâneur, sporting a Lake Hawea Station label on the jacket’s lining.
Through the story telling of Jensen and Ross that you can appreciate the journey of the wool from Lake Hawea Station to the backs and bottoms of stylish gentleman.
The Ross family’s passion for contemporary farming practises stretches from the management of mountainous paddocks, where merinos climb with enthusiasm, to the inside of the shearing shed where a contract, with the sheep, has pride of place.
“We know all sheep are sentient beings – they feel anxiety, stress and pain just like we do,” reads part of the contract. “Whenever and wherever we interact with our sheep, we will operate in a calm, stress-free manner to ensure our sheep are also calm and stress-free.”
Putting this into practise means that shearers at the station are rewarded for the quality and care of their work rather than quantity.
“There was a bit of push back in the beginning,” Geoff says. “But what is encouraging is that many of the shearers have taken this approach with them to other farms. It’s the beginning of change.”
It’s also brilliant marketing. “Justine and I both used to be in marketing and communications,” Geoff says. They brought those skills to founding 42 Below vodka, selling the company to alcohol giant Bacardi in 2006.
Those entrepreneurial skills returned when they purchased Lake Hawea Station in 2018.
“As soon as we got here, the first thing we asked, like any marketer would, was ‘what do your customers want?’ Not many farmers ask that question,” says Geoff.
Researching the attitude of fashion customers towards wool, they discovered major concerns around climate change, biodiversity loss and how the animals are treated.
At the same time in 2020, US Vogue ran an article “Regenerative Agriculture Can Change the Fashion Industry – And The World.
“Everything aligned.”
Partnerships with sustainable New Zealand footwear brand AllBirds, ethical luxury label Maggie Marilyn and British knitwear brand Sheep Inc, followed but the MJ Bale relationship is a new milestone.
“We are trying to show that if you partner with brands like MJ Bale, you can have a commercial relationship and can improve the environment,” Ross says. “We are only one farm but if we can demonstrate this to others, then potentially we can make an impact.”
Jensen is pragmatic about the impact of suits sales on the fashion industry’s status as the second-biggest consumer of water, responsible for 10 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions.
“We’re dealing with a natural fibre, we’re not talking petrochemicals and polyester here. We’re dealing with farms that are carbon positive, and we’re trying to do it in the best way possible.
“We are also shoring up important supply lines, but this is community-minded commerce. The economics of the business of wool growing are such that a lot of people are getting out of it,” says Jensen. “With the merino price as it was over the last decade, it’s borderline break even.”
“If you get win-wins, there’s a lovely, equilibrium there, that’s positive and, and difficult to find these days.”
“It’s also just lovely wool.”
The writer travelled to Lake Hawea Station in New Zealand as a guest of MJ Bale.
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