Mr R. G. Lund Here For Talks On Wool Promotion

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30219, 26 August 1963, Page 13

Mr R. G. Lund Here For Talks On Wool Promotion

If lower prices for synthetic fibres reduced the price of wool, the woolgrower would not be able to produce profitably, and the only thing to do was to break through the strait-jacket created by synthetic prices, Mr R. G. Lund, regional director of the International Wool Secretariat for Europe, said in Christchurch on Saturday evening.

Mr Lund will speak to the Wool Board and the electoral committee of the Meat and Wool Boards in the next few days about the secretariat’s need for more funds from growers to finance a promotion scheme aimed at making wool a quality product for which the consumer will be willing to pay a premium price.

Confirming views expressed by the managing director of the secretariat (Mr W. J. Vines) when he was recently in New Zealand, that synthetic prices would go on falling, Mr Lund said that the day before he left Europe the price of polyester fibres was cut 15 per cent in Germany, and recently there was a similar cut in France. Mr Lund said the secretariat believed it could break through the synthetic price straight jacket by capitalising on the fact that wool had a wider range of qualities than was possessed by any synthetic fibre, but at the moment this advantage of wool was submerged by the sheer weight of propaganda. The secretariat wanted to bring about a situation where a woman buying five sweaters, three of synthetics and two of wool, would be prepared to pay more for the two woollen sweaters because they gave her more in quality and performance and she knew it. To bring this about it was necessary to institute an international trade mark that indicates -not only the composition of the product but also its performance. The fibre-content standard would require a product of virtually 100 per cent pure wool with the usual tolerances for decoration. There bad always been a problem of labelling, and in some countries a product could be described as woollen when it contained no wool at all. Even in Germany a product could legally be sold as wool when it contained 63 per cent of reused wool and 37 per cent rayon. There would be two sets of

performance standards, one of which would be mandatory requiring, for instance, the product to come up to a certain standard of durability, and the other, which would be optional, would be in respect of certain new processes for wool such as mothproofing and flat setting. The trade mark would have to be registered, licensed to cloth manufacturers and makers up of woollen products, policed by a test staff and promoted so that it would appear as valuable property which every manufacturer would want. The application of the mark would take time, but it was hoped that it would help to raise the quality of woollen products and at the same time the price they could command. Broad Base At the same time, Mr Lund said, it would be absurd to make wool a luxury product. Unless the mark could be applied to a broad base of products they would not succeed in securing a higher price for wool. There was a volume as well as a quality factor involved. “We have got to come down into the mass market while maintaining a reasonable standard of quality.” Mr Lund said that the international trade mark was a promotional technique that the secretariat believed it could use with the greater resources that it hoped to secure from growers. The £l3m (sterling) a year budget sought represented only 2.6 per cent of the value of the wool clips last year of Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand.

By any commercial standards that was a modest proportion of the value of the clip to set aside for promotion. As far as could be gauged the spending on promotion of synthetic manufacturers amounted to 8 to 10 per cent of their turn-over. This was the way that the synthetic interests looked at spending on promotion, and in the long run he felt that H

would dictate how wool interests would also have to look at the matter. Asked what sort of price the secretariat expected for a grower as a result of this spending on promotion, Mr Lund said: “We have been talking in terms of a price at today’s levels in today’s conditions of cost. If costs rise we w’ould probably want to obtain a higher price. The essential point, however, is that we should have a say in what the price should be, and it should not be dictated by synthetic prices.”