Undyed is not a colour. It is the absence of a decision, and the consequence is that the mill cannot tell you in advance what you are going to get.
We ordered forty metres of undyed lambswool against a sample that read as warm oat. What arrived was noticeably greyer — the same specification, the same mill, a different set of fleeces. Nobody had made a mistake.
Why the sample was never a promise
A dyed cloth is matched to a reference. An undyed cloth is whatever the animals produced that year, sorted by eye into rough shades and spun. The sorting is skilled and the range is narrow, but it is a range, and the mill will not guarantee it because it cannot.
Two bolts are never quite the same. The coats are cut one bolt at a time, and the colour on the label is the colour of that bolt.
So the Ground Coat is cut one bolt at a time, and each production run is slightly its own thing. We say so on the product page rather than photographing one run and shipping another.
What we stopped doing
We stopped reshooting. The photographs on this site are of the first run, and the second run is warmer. Reshooting every run would be honest and also unaffordable, so instead the page says the colour varies and the shop assistants have physical swatches.
