Caroline Weder Carrarini
In 2013 the designer Caroline Weder Carrarini from Zermatt (in the Swiss Valais) founded her start-up company NEESCHI – the Valais dialect word for the blacknose sheep. She has made it her mission to use the top-quality wool of the sheep once again for the manufacture of top-quality products. ‘The passionate sheep breeders get hardly anything now for the wool they work so hard to get – many of them just have to throw it away,’ she says. ‘It’s a crying shame. And yet they put so much heart and soul into their work, and the raw material is of outstanding quality.’ She knew from her grandmother that in the old days wool from the blacknose sheep had been used to make carpets. ‘So I started to dream of the blacknose carpet. A pure Swiss product. And Ruckstuhl in Langenthal turned out to be the perfect partner.’