It all started with John Alexander Swift, great-grandfather of today's directors. In the 1890s John was a framesmith, the man Leicestershire's knitters called when their frames needed building or fixing. Around 1895 he decided he'd rather be making the socks himself. He set up on the ground floor of the family framesmithy on The Green, and by 1901 his daughter Dolly was at the machines too. In 1917 we bought Hathern's disused Conservative Club and turned it into a hosiery factory. More than a century later, amazingly, we're still here. And the building has seen a thing or two. Before the war, visiting buyers flatly refused to make the three-mile trek out to the village, so we set up a warehouse by the railway in Loughborough just to keep them happy. Then came the Second World War. Our machines were packed off to a mill in town, and the factory was stacked high with wartime stores, dried milk as far as we know, so heavy they cracked the warehouse floor. Those cracks are still there. We walk over them every day. When peace came, we brought everything home to Hathern, and we've been knitting here ever since. In the late 1990s, long before the alpaca craze, Neil Swift decided to try knitting socks from this soft Peruvian fibre. The first pair was pure alpaca, and it fell apart after a few wears. So we went back to the yarn itself and reworked it until it was tough enough for a sock without losing any of that softness. Alpaca has been our signature ever since. Four generations on, alpaca leads the way, with wool, mohair and cotton close behind. We knit them on traditional ribbed machines, which hold a sock's shape without a top full of elastic. Each pair is made to feel like a small luxury and to stand up to everyday life, because that's what a good sock should do. And every single pair is made in our own factory, in a building that has already outlived most of the companies it once shared a trade with.