How I Designed the Sheep Shed: A Range of British Wool Dog Collars Made by Hand

I went to Crufts in March 2025 and left bored. Plastic everywhere, the same printed patterns recycled across a hundred different brands, materials I knew would not hold up after a year of being chewed, dragged through hedges, and washed in a sink. Everyone was a sheep, following the herd, changing a colourway here, a print there, calling it new. I came home and asked myself what I could make that was actually different, and that I could be honest about.

My background is not in product design. I came up through music events, nightlife, brand creation, and artist development, identifying unknown talent and helping put them in front of audiences. Before Green Dog, I had never made a single thing by hand in my life. I am a fluent Mandarin speaker and had a brief stretch trying to manufacture in China, where I had almost no control over the work, and I came away knowing I never wanted to do that again. The instinct after Crufts was simple. Whatever the herd was doing, I would do the opposite. British materials. One pair of hands. Handmade, in Oxford, by me.

What follows is the route I actually took to design the Sheep Shed range. The dead end I started with, the wools I chose, the weaves I worked out, and the six months of testing on customers' dogs before any of it went on the shelf properly.

Where the Sheep Shed Started

The first idea was not the Sheep Shed. It was leather collars lined with wool. I made a few prototypes and quickly realised the design already existed, having been done by other British makers for years. Lining is also a hidden detail. The wool sits inside the collar where no one sees it, doing useful work but not earning the visual identity of the collar. That did not interest me.

So I dropped the lining idea after about a week and asked a different question. What if the wool was the collar? Not as backing, not as decoration, but as the structural fibre that holds it all together. I knew weaving from my paracord work. I had been weaving paracord by hand for the personalised paracord collar since the early days of Green Dog, and customers loved the texture and the depth of pattern that comes from a tight weave. The question was whether wool fibre, rather than synthetic cord, could be coaxed into the same kind of structure.

The honest answer is that early prototypes were rough. Wool behaves very differently to paracord. It compresses, it holds tension differently, and it needs different splice points. I spent several weeks reworking weave patterns until the fibre sat the way I wanted it to. The breakthrough was a three-row weave I now call the trilobite, named for the way the fibre rows interlock, which became the basis for the Classic.

The Three Wools: Brampton, Dingley, and Swaledale

I wanted named British wool from named places, not generic blended yarn. Three sources came together over the development period and they are still the three wools the range uses today.

Brampton is the workhorse. Charcoal grey, dense, takes a tight weave well, and reads as natural rather than dyed. Dingley is the lighter sister, ecru white, pairing nicely with Brampton in the hybrid leads. Swaledale is a true breed wool from the Yorkshire Dales, named for the breed of sheep itself rather than a place. It does not sit comfortably in the 4mm woven structures, so I use it for the wool rope leads, where its natural lustre and length come into their own.

The Weaves: Classic, Mini, and Sighthound

The collar range settled into three constructions, one for each kind of dog the studio sees most often.

The Classic uses a three-row trilobite weave on a 25mm strap. It is the most popular by a clear margin and works on most breeds from spaniels through to retrievers. The Mini uses a two-row fishtail weave on a 15mm strap, designed specifically for small breeds where the standard 25mm width feels heavy or visually too much. The Sighthound is a four-row wide construction on a 38mm strap, made for whippets, lurchers, and Italian greyhounds, where a wider strap distributes pressure across a long thin neck.

Each weave was developed in the same way. I would weave a sample by hand, fit it to a known dog, walk with it for a few weeks, and then either keep it or unpick it and start again. Anyone who has seen me with the seam ripper at the workshop bench knows the rhythm of it.

Six Months on Real Dogs

The 12 April 2025 launch was a soft launch, not a full release. The range went out to existing customers in small numbers, deliberately, so I could see how the wool aged in actual use rather than under workshop conditions. Some collars went to dachshunds, some to whippets, some to working spaniels, and one to a Newfoundland. Six months of muddy walks, river swims, garden chewing, and the occasional washing machine accident.

What came back through that period changed the production specs in small but important ways. The standard wool rope lead settled at 14mm spliced wool, 130cm long. The hybrid rope leads, which combine a Brampton or Dingley PPM core with a BioThane stopper, settled at 10mm and 120cm. Sighthound collar stitching tightened up after I saw how much sideways tension a strong whippet can put on a strap. Mini sizing was slightly recalibrated. None of those decisions came from a design brief on paper. They came from real dogs and from owners telling me what was working and what was not.

If you want to see the current production specs and how to fit a Sheep Shed collar to your dog, the measuring guide covers it. The care instructions page covers how to wash and look after the wool over time.

Why the Range Is Called the Sheep Shed

I came back from Crufts thinking everyone there was a sheep, following the same herd. The name is a small joke about that, with the obvious double meaning given the materials. The shed is also where the work happens, in my case the workshop in Oxford where every collar in the range is woven, spliced, and bound by my own hands. There is no team. There is no factory. It is one person and a bench.

Self-taught is the other piece of it. I have never trained as a leatherworker, a weaver, or a textile designer. I came at all of it sideways from a music industry background where I learned how to build something from nothing, and how to recognise originality when I saw it. Green Dog is the first time I have actually made physical things with my hands, rather than building brands and platforms online. The Sheep Shed is the clearest expression of that, because every part of it, from the wool source to the weave structure to the splice technique, came out of working it out in the workshop rather than copying anyone else.

For more on the underlying ranges, the Sheep Shed collection is the place to start. The Brampton Classic is the most popular collar in the range, and the Brampton Hybrid Rope Lead is its matching lead.

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