Our Past: Their Journey

We often get asked why we started Adagio Mills. Andrew and I are both engineers and in 2007, we moved to Orange from Sydney for work with a plan to stay for 2 years. We loved it so much we are still here! After a few years we bought a 9 acre property to follow our dream to grow as much of our food as possible and share it with our visiting family and friends. As part of this process we decided to initially stock alpacas. The primary reason for this was our paddocks can get quite boggy so their padded foot was suitable for our ground and they are very easy care for people like us who are very new to farming. The breeder we were talking to also said the magic words... "you can spin and knit with the fleece". That drew my love for handcrafts into the decision! So we took our 3 pregnant female alpacas home. We loved every minute of having them on the property. I soon realised that I don't have the patience for handspinning (and hence I have great respect for those that do!) so we found that we could send our fleece away to be spun. We LOVED the results. There is something really special about seeing my children in clothing knitted by me and made from yarn grown on our property. 

However we couldn't quite let go of the engineers in us, this whole process started us asking questions. The questions started with "Why was there no one in NSW at the time offering this service?", "What do people do with their fleece currently?" and just kept coming! As we found answers, we found more questions, which led to more answers and more questions until we found ourselves writing a business plan. As engineers with a love for alpacas, fibres and crafts it made us uniquely placed to start such a project.

It wasn't a quick process, it took us a few years to source the right equipment, prepare the business plan, longer than we expected to obtain finance then about a year for our milling equipment to be manufactured. We found out that our funding was approved the week before our Xavier was born!

There were a number of necessary items that we were unable to obtain bank funding for so we did a kickstarter campaign. This was wonderful, challenging, inspiring, hard, frustrating, uplifting and rewarding all rolled into one. It really started a conversation about Adagio Mills and we gained 200 wonderful backers who were our very first customers. It made a huge difference for our business initially financially, enabling us to set up our water recycling system, but then later in the year these backers became our very first customers and it was wonderful to have a set of understanding people to have our very first yarns. 

The milling equipment finally arrived in May of 2015. This was such an exciting moment, when those trucks rolled up, unloaded and we took the crowbar to open the first box. This was the moment it all became very real. 

We officially commissioned the mill with the manufacturer's chief engineer in June 2015 and off we went. There were challenges aplenty. Starting a mill in Orange in the middle of winter with daily maximum temperatures below 5 degrees Celcius was in hindsight not the best plan. But that was when the equipment arrived and meant that we had to learn everything the hard way. Many of our machines are prototypes specifically designed for us so there wasn't an operating manual in sight!