I am being inundated with adverts for Temu. I watched a few youtube videos of Temu yarn hauls. I know that China has its own wool production and that some of the wool comes from the fleece of breeds specific to China, such as the fine-wool Gansu breed. .I also know that there is a Chinese sheep breed called Chinese Merino, as well as another one, created in 2016 that is called the Alpine Merino sheep. So plenty of reasons to wonder if I might find some interesting (and cheap) wool on Temu.
China is the the world’s number one wool exporter and where almost all the wool processing is done. As wool is not perishable, in theory, buying directly from China and waiting for 6-8 weeks for the goods to arrive could make economical sense. You would be bypassing all the intermediaries + Temu is offering free shipping (at least on your first order). But I browsed their site for a long long time and the answer is : no, there is no cheap wool available on Temu.
I don’t speak Chinese so I first tried a search in my native language (French), to no avail. I switched to English: same result. They kept showing the same items that were not related to my requests. None were actual sheep’s wool, only synthetic fibers that looked a lot like wool What about yak wool, I thought (here again, we’re very near the actual production zones)? Well, I almost fell for it. The price was low for yak wool, but not dirt cheap low. I started reading the reviews and amidst a sea of positive ones, I found one of an unhappy customer, complaining that this “yak wool” was in fact not at all yak wool but 100% acrylic! My guess is that this was an actual review from an actual customer amidst a sea of dodgy, ill-informed or even fake ones.
What about the Temu hauls? First and foremost, none of them were independent reviews of the products. All the youtubers explained that they were not paid by Temu to do their Temu haul video, that they had paid for the products that they were reviewing, that they free to speak out their minds about the qualities of the yarn they had purchased But all also made it known that they would be getting a percentage of sales made through their embedded links.. I didn’t come across any youtuber that had tried to by sheep, cashmere or yak yarn on Temu (maybe they hadn’t found any in their search?). Interestingly, they did criticise some of their purchases. The critics fell into 2 categories : 1) the abysmal quality of some of the yarn (which meant that they considered they had paid too much for it),2) and/or a mismatch between the description or the label of the yarn and the actual fibre. This was especially the case for milk cotton yarn where the youtubers reported receiving cotton or synthetic fibers instead of the advertised milk cotton.
Don’t buy yarn at Temu, it’s a scam. If you get lucky, you will receive some not too bad synthetic fibre yarn, maybe somewhat cheaper than at your local store or elsewhere online. The odds are however against you : you are very m likely to get a yarn you won’t be knitting or crocheting with. You might get some yarn you will find good enough to use and some yarn you won’t, making the global purchase costly. Not only is Yarn on Temu a scam, it’s also an expensive way of buying lower-priced yarn.
Unsolicited Knitting Advice 