Tim Deane's Mission: Reviving New Zealand's Passion for Wool Socks

Three years ago, Deane and his wife, Sarah, bought Norsewear, in the tiny North Island settlement of Norsewood, in the Tararua district. It makes, mostly, socks. And it makes only woollen socks, largely from merino wool. It is not quite right, tempting as it is, to say he has a fetish for socks, though he certainly has a thing for socks. He still has a pair of the Norsewear socks he wore at 16 for his first job on a Canterbury sheep farm. They sport his grandmother’s darns. Nobody knows how to darn a sock any more. We just chuck ’em out and buy a new three-pack. He says his elderly socks are pretty buggered now but he has kept them for nostalgic reasons. He might donate them to the Norsewear archive. The Norsewear archive is a treasure trove, an exercise in nostalgia, of all things woolly. There are pictures of jumpers from the 80s, which are very Scandi noir and so cool again. They had a go at recreating them. They’re fantastic, with snowflake patterns. I want one. He says I’ll have to wait. They have yet to perfect them. “But they are coming.” Deane has long had a thing for wool. From a young age he wanted to be in the wool business. He left school to become a sheep farmer on that Canterbury sheep farm where he worked for five months before going off to learn wool-classing at Lincoln University. He wanted to be a sheep man. “I think they’re amazing animals. I think they’re underrated. They’re actually intelligent creatures.” What a top fellow he is. A man after my own heart. Would he like to hear my top sheep facts? Did he have a choice? That is a rhetorical question, obviously. Sheep, I tell him, can recognise up to 100 human faces. And they will remember your face even if you haven’t seen them for a year. “Well. I did not know those facts. They didn’t tell us that at Lincoln.” He loved everything about wool. “There’s just something about wool. You go into a shearing shed, you can smell the lanolin. It’s a fabulous product. And then you get into the science of it and it’s a miracle fibre. It’s a very high-tech fibre. And so, I don’t know, it just intrigued me.” He went back to Lincoln to do an agricultural science degree. He graduated in 1988 and couldn’t get work on a sheep farm. There were no jobs in wool. The wool market was stuffed. Our houses were stuffed with synthetic carpets and our furniture stuffed with synthetic foam. It was the beginning of a long lament for a product that had once been loved and celebrated. We were a country of sheep and nobody wanted wool. He became a dairy board farm adviser. “And then I had a sort of corporate career for the following 35 years.” Sort of? He was managing director of Goodman Fielder, managing director of Fonterra Brands, and is now a director at Rabobank. Sheep man became a banker. How did that happen? Accidentally. “I’m not sure. I suppose I was relatively good at it. And, you know, I probably was always a little unorthodox but nevertheless I loved working with people and I’m quite curious. I always asked a whole lot of dumb questions and sort of progressed through the corporate world. All the way through I did have the desire to one day own my own business. I sort of got to my mid-50s and thought, ‘Well, if I don’t do it now I’ll be too old and decrepit so I’d better get on with it.’” It is a little unorthodox to chuck it all in, including those nice corporate salaries, to buy a sock-making company. Getting on with it involved re-mortgaging the house. He and Sarah have pretty much thrown every dime they had at it. She says she doesn’t actually remember agreeing to his mad plan. He basically bought a stagnating company. It had been making socks since 1963. But that nation of sheep had turned to cheap imported socks. Deane rebranded the company by going back to its past. Nostalgia is in demand. As is authenticity he says. He didn’t spend all those years as a high-flying corporate geezer and not learn a trick or two. The first thing he did after buying the Norsewear business in 2023 was to buy back the brand from Apparel Brands, which had bought it in 2007. Then he investigated the archives. He wanted to buy a heritage as much as a sock-spinning factory. Norsewear had made the socks for Ed Hillary’s grand traverse of Aoraki Mt Cook in 1971 and for an earlier Antarctic expedition. There’s got to be a good slogan in there, right? You bet. Here it is: If Sir Ed wore our socks and took on the world, so can we. You can see how that would be irresistible to a former high-flying corporate geezer. He has a talent for a slogan. Norsewear won New Zealand Marketing Magazine’s Excellence in Brand Transformation Strategy category last year. Also in 2025, Norsewear won the contract, over international bidders, to make the NZ Defence Force’s socks. His job description might be: making wool cool again. “I’m never going to transform the wool industry but what I hope to do is provide an example of doing something that people reckon you can’t – to help encourage people to think differently. “People will tell you that we can’t manufacture apparel in New Zealand. People will tell you that you can’t really build a global brand from New Zealand because we’re too far away. People will tell you that consumers won’t pay more just because of a brand or just because of the quality. And I don’t believe those views are correct and we’re proving that they’re not.” You can see that he was relatively good at being a corporate geezer. He is not averse to a bit of of cheeky marketing. He posted an open letter to the All Blacks management after some rugby fans contacted the company to bemoan the fact that the All Blacks’ beanies were made of synthetic fibre and not from NZ wool. “We want those cauliflower ears protected from the cold.” The All Blacks’ response? “Thank ewe for reaching out.” He says the point of the bit of cheek was not simply to have a go at the All Blacks for wearing synthetic beanies. “Even sheep farmers are wearing synthetic beanies when they should be wearing wool. All these rural companies issue corporate clothing which is synthetic. So I think probably we could have a poke at the All Blacks but I think just have a walk down the hall of mirrors ourselves and say, ‘Look, what are we doing as New Zealanders to support the industry?’ And, yeah, it might cost a little bit more for a really high-quality jumper but it’ll last longer. The cost per wear is probably quite good.” He is partial to a pun. Sheep people often are, I have discovered. He describes the Norsewear team of around 20 as “close knit”. I asked if he’d ever had a pet sheep and he said, “I have not”. What a disappointment he is. “I’m sorry about that. I just have to stick to my knitting.” There would be more disappointment to come. My pet sheep need shearing. Could he come and shear them? No, he couldn’t. He can’t shear a sheep. He’s never been able to shear a sheep. Deane was born in Auckland and the family moved to Christchurch when he was 6. He is the eldest of three. His brother Nick is a vet; his sister Elisabeth is in HR. He was raised in what he describes as a strict Baptist family. His parents were schoolteachers; his father, Hudson, was also a theologian and became the principal of the Bible College of New Zealand. He was tremendously reluctant to tell me what a strict Baptist upbringing was like and I was tremendously eager to know what such a childhood was like. I think he thought I was going to make out that he grew up in a cult. I resorted to asking specifically daft questions. Was he allowed to listen to the radio? “We could definitely listen to the radio. We could definitely play cards. We could definitely go to the movies. It wasn’t Gloriavale.” He does believe in God. “I certainly have a faith in God. There’s a whole bunch about organised religion that, you know, I find a bit tough. So I probably most closely relate to sort of more a liberal Anglican than my parents, who were very, very strict conservative Baptists.” He later sent a message to tell me that his dad, who is 87 (his mother, Rosemary, died in 2024), has mellowed over the years and now goes to an Anglican church. “So definitely not a fundamentalist horror story.” He attached a smiley face emoji. All right. I had better stress that he definitely did not grow up in a cult, which, for my purposes, is also a bit disappointing. I am also going to have to abandon any idea of him having ever been a flash corporate geezer. There’s not anything much flashy about him, and I’m pretty certain has never been. He says he has never been driven by money. But “there’s no question it’s very helpful and if you’ve got sufficient, it’s great. You know I don’t have any aspirations to be a billionaire or anything. For me, it’s useful and it’s important and it enables you to have experiences in life that you wouldn’t have if you don’t have it. We were very fortunate to take the kids [they have four boys] on overseas trips. We took the kids to Africa … we took the kids to Europe and spent five weeks travelling around Europe. You can’t do that without money.” He and Sarah, an occupational therapist who works with children with developmental delay, live on 2.8 hectares on the Tāwharanui Peninsula in northern Auckland. Their house is a little 105 sq m farm cottage built in 1885, which they have renovated while keeping as much of “the old stuff” as they could. It is hardly a flash corporate house, then. “No. We’ve got a few flash corporate houses around us. But, no, we just got a tiny, beautiful slice of paradise.” They are about to go on holiday to Matapōuri, in Northland, where they pay an annual lease on a bach owned by a number of Māori families. It’s a fibrolite bach with a long drop and dodgy cellphone reception. “It’s got a wee bit better but in the old days you’d have to climb the pōhutukawa tree.” He likes riding his Triumph Tiger 800 motorbike and fishing and reading Lee Child thrillers and books about spies. He listens to podcasts about people who have started successful businesses. That sounds like work. “But it’s interesting.” Not as interesting as sheep. I was looking at a picture on the company’s Instagram page of a lamb wearing a little coat made out of an old Norsewear sock. It was taken before he bought the company and he hadn’t seen it before. He found it and so we both looked and marvelled at the ingenuity – and the cuteness. He had to start making them, I said bossily, having just promoted myself to his marketing director. They must have reject socks. They do and guess what? He thinks it’s a terrific idea. Pet coats are all the rage. He could do them for dogs, too. He has already begun investigating how to make them and he’s going to send me one for my next lamb in need. He loves sheep, so of course I was always going to think he’s a top bloke.