““Woolens were fundamentally different from cottons – advances in cotton processing made cotton goods accessible to everyone, creating a new market whereas advances in wool processing slightly reduced the price of an already established product. This highlights the importance of demand in industrial growth. Cotton and woolens each experienced radical innovation in processing technology; each was transformed from a cottage industry to a mechanized, capital-intensive, factory production system. However, cotton grew rapidly while wool grew slowly. In fact, wool grew less rapidly than the economy despite this transformation of production. The reason for the difference lies in the nature of demand for the product. Wool was already a mature product, even though its production processes were about to be transformed. The production improvements simply made woolens a bit cheaper but the market was already saturated and so grew only slowly. Cottons, in contrast, were a new product in new markets. The production advances in cotton reduced costs and prices sufficiently to make cottons accessible to everyone. This was equivalent to creating new and potentially huge markets. Cottons then followed the classic S-shaped (logistic) market adoption pattern - slow adoption initially then rapid adoption and rapid growth before the market finally reached maturity (became saturated) with sales, and so production, levelling off.””
