Our Past: Their Journey

Nadine & Andrew, both being engineers, decided in 2007 to move to Orange from Sydney for work with a plan to stay for 2 years but they loved it so much they stayed longer!

After a few years they bought a 9 acre property to follow their dream to grow as much of their own food as possible with a part of this process to initially stock Alpacas.

The Alpaca breeder they were talking to also said the magic words... "You can Spin & Knit with their fleece" which drew the first love for handcrafts and made the decision to purchase quite easy and took 3 pregnant female alpacas home.

After soon realising that Nadine didn’t have the patience for hand spinning  (and hence the great respect for those that do) she wanted to find a way their fleece could be spun.

“There is something really special about seeing your children in clothing knitted by yourself made from yarn grown on their property”.

However they couldn't quite let go of the engineers in them and this whole process started asking questions…."Why was there no one in NSW at the time offering this service?", "What do people do with their fleece currently?" and the questions just kept coming!

As they found the answers, more questions followed and that led to more answers and more questions until they found themselves writing a business plan. As engineers with a love for alpacas, fibres and crafts it made it a unique place to start such a project.  But it wasn't a quick process, it took them a few years to source the right equipment, prepare the business plan, obtain finance then about a year for the milling equipment to be manufactured.

There were a number of necessary items that they were unable to obtain bank funding for so they did a ‘Kickstarter Campaign” which was wonderful, challenging, inspiring, hard, frustrating, uplifting and rewarding all rolled into one.   It really help start a conversation about Adagio Mills and it gained 200 wonderful backers who were the very first customers.

The milling equipment finally arrived in May of 2015 and this was such an exciting moment, when those trucks rolled up, unloaded and then taking a crowbar to open the first box. This is the moment it all became very real!

They officially commissioned the mill with the manufacturer's chief engineer in June 2015 and there were challenges aplenty!  Starting a mill in Orange in the middle of winter with daily maximum temperatures below 5 degrees Celsius was in hindsight not the best plan but that was when the equipment arrived and it meant that they had to learn everything the hard way. Many of the machines were prototypes specifically designed so there wasn't an operating manual in sight! 

The Adagio Mills team were fantastic and they couldn't have made it this far without them. Watching the little team grow, develop skills and provide local employment was wonderful.

The first, commercially available, Adagio Mills yarn was in December 2015 and the knitting machine was in January 2019.

Everyone was so excited to be able to process from raw fibre to finished garment, all in one place!

After 6 years in operation and reinventing the business 3 times, from focusing on processing for others to producing the ‘Adagio Mills’ own yarn brands to purchasing a knitting machine to make our own scarves and then holding tours to encourage tourists to visit, we are so proud of what we and our team have achieved. The overwhelming feedback was that our customers loved our products and we thank them for their patronage and often repeat business.

However, sadly Nadine & Andrew made the heart wrenching decision to close Adagio Mills doors on 30th July 2021.