Yarns
As a specialist luxury hosiery and knitwear manufacturer, Corgi uses only the very finest yarns in all of its garments.
Our cashmere socks and knitwear are made from the best Himalayan cashmere, taken from the underbelly of goats living high in the mountains. The fibres used are the finest available, averaging only 16 microns in diameter, or one quarter the diameter of a human hair. The yarn is processed and dyed in the UK by the world’s leading cashmere yarn manufacturer before being knitted into our garments.
Likewise Corgi only uses the very best quality pure wools and cottons for all of its socks and knitwear, always looking for the softest and most luxurious handle.
Knitting machines
21st century technologies sit happily alongside 120-year-old knitting machines on the Corgi factory floor. In fact, the rare Griswold hand-knitting machines and hand operated flat-knitting machines used to found the company are still used to this day.
While new high-tech knitting machines are used to produce Corgi’s trademark colourful fine-gauge socks, even these are hand finished individually at the hands of one of our highly-skilled workers.
Hand linking
All of Corgi’s socks are hand finished using a process called hand linking, outlined below.
Each sock is knitted as a long tube with the toe section left open, and then passed to one of our hand linkers to have the toes closed using the same technique used by Corgi for over one hundred years.
The linkers carefully line up the stitches on the front and back of each toe before stitching them together. This is a highly skilled operation that takes several months to learn.
The socks are then washed and dried, before being hand turned. Each sock being carefully checked, and all yarn ends are tightened and trimmed - this can take up to twenty minutes per pair.
The socks are then pressed on wooden size boards in a traditional press, the same one that has been used at Corgi for the past 60 years.
Finally each pair of socks is labelled by hand before being packed and shipped to our customers.
Fine knitwear and handmade 100% cashmere socks
Each of these garments is made individually on a hand knitting machine by a highly skilled worker at our factory in Wales, UK.
On average a single sweater will take up to a day to produce. The knitting patterns for all our knitwear are written by our in-house design team using a method passed down through the generations and great care is taken to ensure that each piece is perfectly shaped and of the highest quality.
Each garment is made from a number of fully fashioned pieces (front, back, sleeves etc.) that are carefully hand knitted on flat bed knitting machines. These pieces are then linked together by our team of highly skilled hand linkers before being passed to the hand sewers who finish the garments, attaching buttons and zips, and then carefully hand sewing all ends to give a high quality finish. All garments are then carefully laundered before being labelled, packed and shipped to our customers.
