Award honours staple of industry

Wool industry veteran Keith Ovens has been named the inaugural winner of the Heather Perriam Memorial Award, which recognises those who have given service to the merino industry.

The award was made at the recent Otago Merino Association awards and was established to mark the contribution the late Heather Perriam made to the merino industry, through ownership of Bendigo Station with her husband John, and establishing the Merino Shop at Tarras.

In addition, Mrs Perriam was an active fundraiser for the Child Cancer Foundation through the celebrity wether, Shrek.

Mr Ovens described the award as an honour.

It recognised his 32-year career in the wool industry, during which he graduated from trainee classer to Dunedin wool branch manager and to commercial manager for the New Zealand Merino Company.

Wool was in Mr Ovens's blood.

His father, Graeme, was a wool buyer for Alliance Textiles, based in Oamaru, for 45 years, and Mr Ovens said his love of wool was nurtured by weekends helping and watching his father at work.

Those observations, he said, gave him an understanding of wool processing that were to assist him later in life.

On leaving Waitaki Boys High School Mr Ovens started work as a trainee classer with Wrightsons in Dunedin.

Mr Ovens said the store was the firm's largest and most diverse, and his father advised it would give him a strong grounding in the industry.

Wrightsons later sent him to Lincoln University to complete the wool course and Diploma in Wool Technology, in which he topped the class with honour passes.

He worked his way up from field officer to assistant branch manager, working under renowned wool manager, the late Buck Gloag.

On Mr Gloag's death in the early 1990s, Mr Ovens was promoted to branch manager and soon faced his first crisis.

On the eve of his second sale as Dunedin branch manager, Mr Ovens said the Australian Wool Corporation announced it was releasing 250,000 bales of stock-piled wool, potentially decimating the market.

The Dunedin sale had 20,000 bales rostered and attempts by Mr Ovens to postpone it were rejected by senior management.

He recalled how his worst fears materialised, with the market falling up to $3 a kg, forcing the passing of 70% of the offering.

But within a week the market had stabilised, helped by the decision not to sell most of the offering.

"I took a caning on the day with the passings because it had not been done before," he said in an interview.

But it set the scene for the development of contracted wool supply, with farmers telling Mr Ovens they needed more certainty.

"It was the catalyst for me to be open to change," he said.

That change started in 1997 when clothing manufacturer John Smedley came looking for contracted supplier-farmers via the New Zealand Merino company.

Mr Ovens said his managers were lukewarm to the proposal, but he pursued it, anyway.

One of the first to sign up was Robert Butson, from Mt Nicholas Station on the shore of Lake Wakatipu.

"He wanted security and this was one way we could do it," he said.

Mr Butson remains an enthusiastic supporter of contracted supply, and Mr Ovens said for the subsequent 13 years, the Smedley contract price has almost continuously been ahead of the auction price.

In the early 1990s, Mr Ovens was instrumental in getting merino farmers to replace synthetic wool packs with nylon.

Wool users were complaining of contamination from synthetic fibres and together with exporter PBM, and users Reda and Baberis, Wrightson imported a container of the packs, then worth $75, and started convincing farmers to switch.

It helped that some customers offered $50 rebates for the packs, but Mr Ovens said within three years all merino farmers were using them.

In 2001, Wrightson merged its fine wool business with the New Zealand Merino Company, and together with Mike Hargadon and Craig Adam from the Dunedin store, Mr Ovens moved with the business to Christchurch.

He said the shift expanded the scope of his work to focus solely on fine wool and included marketing, selling and an expansion in his role in contracted supply.

Today, 55% of the wool handled by New Zealand Merino is contracted.

Mr Ovens said he had seen a shift from little or negligible use of New Zealand merino wool in garments to wide use today.