Making It Work: Knitwear brand embraces expo opportunity to showcase traditional Irish craft

Vincent Hughes, co-owner of the Aran Woollen Mills knitwear brand, has had his fair share of ups and downs during his time in business, but the pandemic was one of the toughest challenges he’s had to face.

“On March 18, 2020, we had €1.4 million worth of orders cancelled,” Hughes, a Co Mayo native, said. “And we had to stomach that, and try to sell that stock a different way. It was a right sucker punch.”

For decades, Aran Woollen Mills, founded by the Hughes family in the 1960s and which now forms a part of the Carraig Donn retail group, has sold its famous knitted sweaters to tourists through resellers, rather than marketing them directly to the customer.

When the pandemic hit, those resellers, who were heavily dependent on the tourist trade, cancelled their orders en masse and scrambled to adapt to an online world. Aran Woollen Mills had been increasingly embracing digital B2B sales before Covid, so it was able to supply resellers with stock for their online stores quite quickly.

“All retailers had to close up, no matter what country they were in, so our business became 100 per cent internet,” Hughes said. “And in the first year our internet business grew by 50 per cent straight away.”

Customers can’t buy Aran Woollen Mill sweaters directly from the brand’s website, Hughes explained, with only licensed retailers able to sell the products. He said the firm would “in future have to look at that strategy and see where we can take it”.

In the meantime the Enterprise Ireland-backed company has begun investing heavily in maximising its online reach, ramping up its digital marketing and hiring an e-commerce and branding manager.

“We’ve also improved the quality of our photography and the other assets we supply to our resellers so they have better ammunition to sell our brand on their own sites,” Hughes said.

With online sales strong and foreign travel starting to return in earnest, Aran Woollen Mills believes it is now well positioned for growth. Hughes said he was confident the business was on a more positive trajectory coming out of the pandemic.

“This year, we’ve budgeted for 30 per cent growth, and I suspect next year that growth will be close to 20 per cent.” Hughes said he expected to employ around 110 people by the end of the year.

But while the company is embracing the digital age, it is still steeped in tradition. Aran Woollen Mills was founded by Hughes’s mother Maura, along with her husband Padraig, in 1965. The ethos that underpinned Aran Woollen Mills then is still central to the company today, and it takes seriously its role as a purveyor of quality Irish craftsmanship. This weekend, the company will be presenting its goods at Showcase Ireland, the country’s main creative expo.

“It’s everything for us. Showcase gives you a great start to the year, because you’re showing off your product and you’re getting hundreds of customers,” said Hughes. “People come from all over the world and they want to write orders, so you often come home with an order book that could be two or three months long.”