Havelock Wool

Havelock Wool was founded in 2014 by Andrew Legge, who had built a house some years earlier in the New Zealand town of Havelock and become persuaded — partly by the building, partly by the place — that the right material for insulating a North American home was the same one that had insulated Pacific houses for a hundred years and had insulated sheep for considerably longer than that. He set up the firm in Reno on the practical observation that New Zealand wool, baled and shipped to a single American manufacturing site, would meet the building-science specifications of the modern North American residential and commercial market without recourse to fibreglass, foam, or the petrochemicals those categories rely on.

The firm manufactures wool-based insulation in three principal forms — batt, loose-fill, and blown — for residential, commercial, and specialty applications including recreational-vehicle and tiny-home construction. The product is approximately 96% wool with a small fraction of low-melt bicomponent fibre that bonds the matrix; the wool itself arrives in bales from New Zealand and is processed, blended, and packaged at the Reno facility on Edison Way into which the firm moved in 2019. Havelock’s customers run from the residential builder selecting an alternative to fibreglass batts to the institutional specifier choosing a non-toxic insulation for a building intended to be lived in by people sensitive to indoor-air-quality questions.

What distinguishes Havelock Wool in its sector is the categorical choice itself. North American building insulation is, by volume, dominated by fibreglass and foam — categories whose manufacturing footprints are large, whose end-of-life paths are awkward, and whose installer health profiles are well-documented; Havelock has built a single-material, single-source operation around the proposition that wool is the structurally and environmentally correct answer to the same question. The firm is one of very few American manufacturers operating at scale in the wool-insulation category, and the Reno facility is the centre of gravity of that category in North America.

The practice has worked with Havelock Wool at the Reno manufacturing facility on Lean process implementation across operations.