An American girlfriend introduced Jeremy Moon to Brian Brackenridge, a merino sheep farmer she’d stayed with while hitchhiking around New Zealand. Across the table, Brian threw Jeremy a prototype thermal tee-shirt made from 100% merino wool. Jeremy, then a 24-year-old marketing graduate, wondered if he could sell enough of the prototype fabric to visit his girlfriend in the US. But when he wore the tee-shirt in the outdoors, he became so enthusiastic about merino’s potential that he never saw his girlfriend again – she was jilted for a sheep.

Merino combines the best qualities of traditional wool, synthetics and cotton. It’s soft and non-itch, it’s warm in the cold and cool in the heat, it breathes to prevent clamminess, and it has a miraculous ability to warn off stinkiness – you can run a marathon and still smell as sweet as if you’ve spent the day on the sofa.