Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kaitlyn Cockcroft. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Kaitlyn, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s talk about social media – do you manage your own or do you have someone or a company that handles it for you? Why did you make the choice you did?

I manage my own social media for my cross stitch shop, KC Stitchery. I maintain an instagram and Facebook page as well as Etsy sales shop.

I am a one woman shop so I am my only employee qualified to manage social media! I don’t think I would want someone else to do it regardless. I as the creator of my products know how I want to present them. What features I want to highlight. What behind the scenes looks like.

The biggest thing I have learned through managing my socials is to respond to interactions. I found that people really responded to knowing how long my cross stitches take, so I do daily updates with progress and time expended. I also found that hardly any business is driven through my socials, but rather all through my Etsy. So instead of stressing about posting to instagram every few hours and getting no engagement, I put the time and effort into updating my Etsy listings. I have seen much more return for my time by focusing my efforts.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am the owner and stitcher behind KC Stitchery, a custom cross stitch shop focusing on home and family portraits. By day I am a tax accountant, so cross stitching is a stress relief for me and an outlet for creativity. I’ve never considered myself an overly creative person, but I get such joy out of my shop.

Cross stitch is like so many other crafts that have made a resurgence in recent years with younger generations getting interested. I am no different. Both of my parents cross stitched so I was able to learn the basics, and during COVID quarantine in 2020, I put them to use.

What I do is take various photos and splice them together into an ideal vision. I use that vision to create a cross stitch design. I do this by hand and just wing it! My accountant brain is able to process the box like patterns of cross stitch and translate that into a portrait. I draw my design out on the fabric itself. A lot of people sketch a design in a computer software first, but I like seeing my vision on the fabric from the beginning to see how it’s coming. Then comes the fun and I get to pick out all the colors and stitch the detail. You’ll never know how many shades of gray there are until you try to find that perfect gray for a roof. Not too blue. Not too purple. Not too brown. Just gray. But when I do find it and it all comes together and I hear from my customers their reactions, it is 110% worth it!

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Posting new products has been a huge help to grow my business. All of what I do is custom and the only limit is the customers imagination. When they see things in another cross stitch, I’ve found that it sparks ideas for them. I typically cross stitch single family homes, but one customer asked me to stitch an apartment building in NYC. It was so different than my normal but I’ve gotten quite a few similar orders since then because seeing something helps spark an idea for my customers. It helps me too! I started this business to start with because I had already done a cross stitch for every family I knew. Each new and unique request builds my skill set and makes it that much more fun.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Perfection is something so many of us struggle with, and that doesn’t exist in crafts. I only have so much control over how a thread lays down and if it gets twisted. You can put your best effort in, but at a point it’s good enough. I still struggle with that. I’ve found that so many times, if I redo something or keep editing to get it “perfect”, it actually looks worse. And will the customer even notice, or just me? I’ve had to reign myself in to make sure I deliver on time and that I don’t create more harm than good overdoing something.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.etsy.com/shop/KCStitcheryByKaitlyn
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/kcstitchery
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/kcstitchery