We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Catherine Hooker. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Catherine below.
Catherine, appreciate you joining us today. I’m sure there have been days where the challenges of being an artist or creative force you to think about what it would be like to just have a regular job. When’s the last time you felt that way? Did you have any insights from the experience?
I started my business in December 2016. I had only been dyeing yarn for three months when it became apparent that I had a knack for it. I had no idea what an Indie Yarn Dyer was. I never even owned real Indie Dyed Yarn up to that point, except for a couple of skeins I bought from a yarn store online. I thought it was a commercial brand. It turned out to be from a woman, who ended up being my virtual yarn dyer instructor months later. Fate? So fast forward to Spring 2017, my business was growing. I signed up with a local yarn shop in the town next to Paradise, California called Chico. Her store was so gracious in loving my work and had me dying wholesale yarn for their clients in no time.
Besides getting more recognition through a local yarn shop, Instagram was the place to be for anything to do with the fiber industry. Whether you were an indie yarn dyer, a knitwear or crochet designer, yarn shop or just a maker and fiber junkie, marketing yourself through Instagram was easy and fun. Back in 2017 and 2018, pictures were still the main way you advertised your brand… your company. Over a year and a half I did live videos every now and then letting people see my dye yarn and posted a handful of short videos to show what was going to be in my next shop update. Pictures were still the name of the game and the most important piece to this is that my fiber followers saw my posts and I also acquired more followers every day.
Then on the morning of November 8, 2018 everything came to a halt. That was the morning that changed everything. The Paradise “Camp Fire” that burned down the majority of the town of Paradise, in addition to other neighboring towns. It was the worst fire in California history up to that point. At 7:20 that morning, I was already working remotely at my full time Oncology Medical Coding day job when we got a knock at the door. A neighbor alerted us that there was a fire behind our house. Alarmed, we looked it up online and saw that it was actually on the other side of the ridge. We lived high up in the forest and there were many ridges. We felt safe because there was a river and lots of land between the ridges. Well, just in case we decided to start packing up some essentials. Around 7:50 am I recorded a video and posted to Instagram that the yarn advent orders that were planned to go out the next day would be delayed. As I was recoding the video, there were ash flakes and chunks of bark falling from the sky. The sky looked grey with some clouds and blue sky peeking through. I still felt safe.
By 8:00 am I was continuing to pack, realizing more and more that we needed to pack more than just the essentials. So the first thing I put by the front door was the advent yarn orders that took me a couple of months to dye up and complete. Next was my kids clothes. I remember I pulled out one of those yellow and black Costco bins and I filled it with their clothes. I later realized I missed what was in the closet and lost some clothes that fit the kids that belonged to my husband when he was about five years old in addition to some vintage leather kids cowboy boots.
Next I ran out to the back shop/storage/garage building and put three heavy boxes full of pictures next to the door and yelled to my husband, who was around the corner in the garage sifting through the safe, that he needed to put these into the truck. I thought he heard me. Turns out he didn’t. I lost my childhood pictures, pre digital age. I forgot to take the kids baby books that I so meticulously put together with novels, practically, of their childhood memories that we could look back on and smile and laugh about. I forgot their extremely large crochet blankets I made for them that would easily cover a full size bed. However, I remembered to snag the ones that my husband’s grandmothers made along with an outfit that his great grandmother made that his dad wore, my husband wore and my oldest son wore. I was lucky to remember the pink crocheted blanket that my grandmother gave me that was halfway done due to her hand arthritis. She gave me the rest of the yarn and I was able to finish it a year before the fire. So luckily I still have that. I also saved a box of baby clothes I had bought and a cute baby blanket I had made for the daughter I lost along with an ultrasound video of her.
Then around 8:40 the lights in the house went out. It was pitch dark and I was so shocked that the kids didn’t freak out. They were 3 (almost 4) and 5.5 years old at that time. Minutes later, my husband yelled from the front of the house, “Cathy get a good pair of shoes and a jacket, we have to go!”. By this time the kids were already in the car and I ran to the car, threw a back pack that I stuffed my favorite pair of pants, shirt, sweater, jackets, dress, my purple bristle hair brush that I have had since I was about 7 years old, phone charger and some underwear and socks into and threw it into the back of the camper shell of the truck. I was about to get into the truck when I realized I forgot one thing. My yarn projects bags that had unfinished projects in them hanging from shelf hooks in my bedroom. I ran, grabbed about four bags and ran back out and got into the driver seat of the GMC truck. My husband set the alarm to the house and he got into the driver seat of my Honda CRV. I had the kids and the mastiff dog in the back seat.
At 8:50 am we then proceeded down our driveway. It was pitch dark outside, as if it were midnight. At the end of our long driveway there were a line of cars driving up the street only, so that is the direction we decided to take. The only light in the sky was an orange glow on the horizon. It was two houses until the four way stop intersection. My husband, Josh, and I got separated by one car after pulling out into the traffic jam. I saw a man, maybe a police officer, directing traffic. He didn’t have any protective mask or breathing equipment on. I will always remember him, acting to heroically. He was not allowing us to turn left because the street up ahead was all on fire. The trees were lighting up one after the other along with homes nestled in between. Up the street, you could actually see deep orange and deep yellow flames coming from every direction. The cars on that part of the street had priority to make a right hand turn (coming from that direction) before we could make our left turn. I remember seeing a school bus and a lot of cars up ahead. Finally, the cars that I had been waiting with to turn, were finally able to make our left hand turn. Once I made a left, I realized I was even more disconnected from Josh as he was still waiting to turn left at the intersection. The cars stopped moving. This was due to it being a major traffic jam. Imagine an hour glass where all of the cars have to funnel out of one tiny escape route. I was near the top of this hour glass as we were near the top of the town. Hundreds if not a thousand or so cars were all on the road at the same time trying, just like we were, to escape this fiery inferno. The next thing I knew, I look over through the passenger window over in the same direction as where the fire was visible and the corner of that street, that was filled in with pine trees, were slowly catching fire and coming straight towards my truck with my kids and dog in it. I then look at the gas gauge and see that it’s below empty. My husband is an expert in things cars and trucks. So I remember him saying years ago that an empty gas tank is more flammable that a full gas tank. In a panic, I call my husband and he tells me to keep on going, that there’s nothing we can do. I then tell him that I will pull over in the grocery store parking lot (equivalent to a few blocks away) and we can climb into the Honda CRV and continue from there.
At this point my husband still hasn’t turned left. It’s been 20 minutes since I left the house and we only got as far as being right around the corner from our house. After getting off the phone with my husband, he later told me, he got a notification that the alarm to the house got tripped. That could only mean one thing, the fire had reached our house. Until we reached the grocery store parking lot, as we creeped down the road, houses were slowly catching fire, propane tanks were exploding and we had no idea if we were going to make it out alive or not. I even remember seeing a parked car explode. Another 25 minutes later, and in reality only a few blocks away from our house, we arrived in the grocery store parking lot. I did drive on the opposite side of the road for about 40 feet so that I could get to where I needed to go in fear of the car stalling on me.
My husband arrived moments later. He unpacked the back seat and threw it into the back of the camper of the truck and we took the kids out of their car seats and threw them into the back seat of the Honda CRV along with our large Mastiff dog. I remember the air made my mouth extremely dry and coughing from the smoke. Josh got into the driver seat, I was in the passenger seat with a really heavy box on top of my leg and we locked up the GMC truck and got back onto the road. I almost think we saved some time doing this because the grocery story was on a corner. So we originally entered in on one side of the parking lot and exited on another side of the parking lot, which was the next street we would have turned onto if we stayed the course. At this point I was having trouble breathing. It was hot. We couldn’t use the air conditioner so the air conditioning and any air flow was off. I thought it was from the fire that I couldn’t breathe but my husband said, “It’s warm in here but I can breathe just fine”. Months later I realized I was having my first panic attack, anxiety at full blast.
My husband saw a fire spout going up the sidewalk about 10 feet from my side of the car. I had no idea. Everything looked the same. Dark sky, embers flying all around, lots of wind, (turns out that large fires create their own weather system inside of the chaos) and buildings on fire and everyone trying to get out this town the same way. This town sits on top of a ridge that has three ways in and out for the most part. The first way was just further up the forest filled mountain which seemed like a bad idea. The second way, was the way that everyone, when leaving my home, was driving away from. Which left one way out. There was once or twice that the wind blew a gap in the smoke covered sky to reveal some blue sky and light from above that gave me so much hope. Within seconds it was covered up again and I fell back to feeling hopeless and scared. Finally three and a half hours later, we made it out, drove past the last of the fires and entered in basking sunlight upon our faces. During the escape we told our kids that we would go get ice cream after we got out. About a week later, we finally remembered to do just that. We also learned that this fire was spreading about a football field per second. The wind was so extreme that the fire would jump from place to place and that is why we got cornered in so easily.
Long story short, this was the beginning of my life transforming and the end of my business. Now newly homeless, my husband had family up in Springfield Oregon who took us in for two weeks to decompress and then we finally drove down to Ventura California where we spent the next three months living in my husband’s grandfather’s living room before we relocated to a very rainy West Linn Oregon.
It took me two years before I could try and start up my yarn business again. After the fire I was still working full time for my remote Oncology Medical Coding job but when I moved to Oregon in March 2019 I reduced it down to 20 hours per week because my husband had to stay in California for the job he acquired while temporarily living down there. Thankfully COVID brought him back home after being gone for a year.
In November 2020, two years after the fire, I started my yarn business back up. I finally started dyeing yarn again and people were ecstatic. I started off by first selling the random pieces of yarn that I saved from the fire. This was after I mailed the pre-purchased yarn advents that I saved as well from the fire. The yarn that I had left over sold out within 30 minutes and I felt a sigh of relief. I thought that my business was going to come back full swing. Well after a couple of shop updates the sales dwindled down but more so I also started noticing that the picture posts I was posting was hardly getting any traction. I noticed that pre fire I would get about 400-600 likes for a photo, sometimes less. I had around 5,000 followers at that time after close to two years in business. (I did gain a couple of thousand followers after the fire due to so many people reaching out and finding ways to help my family and I. They even started a Go Fund Me account for my family. I was just beyond words!)
Now I was getting maybe 100- 200 likes on a post, if I was lucky. I couldn’t figure out why. Then I later learned that the algorithms of Instagram had slowly been changing over the past two years I was out of business. Reels were the new thing that started becoming more of the norm when you opened up Facebook or Instagram. I didn’t have Tik Tok at that time and didn’t realize the influence Tik Tok had on social media. Facebook and Instagram wanted to be just like Tik Tok. Honestly, I can’t even tell which platform I am on these days if I get stuck in a video rabbit hole. Before this change, I liked Facebook for the story telling platform it had with words being the main thing you see with a picture (optional) to support your words, the story that you told. Instagram was the opposite. Pictures were the primary focus with text underneath to support your picture. Tik Tok is all videos and with limited text to support your video. So they all had a purpose and a unique way to identify their platform. Now Facebook and Instagram are practically the same with mostly videos aka “reels”, advertisements galore and a few pictures here and there from the people that you follow who still support the out of fashion picture platform. The downside to this change is that you no longer see the people you follow as much. Secondly the people you do follow, who want to be seen, must fall in line with reels so that the algorithm will be in their favor, therefore just perpetuating the problem of my dislike of reels. I loved Instagram for its pictures. It was quick and easy to get a lay of the land and see what your favorite designers and makers were up to. Now, you have to invest anywhere from 7 seconds to a minute or two to watch what someone is up to. It’s so time intensive and I see so many other accounts that I don’t follow that I find it a waste of my time to even go on there. Thirdly, this transition to reels and being out of the spotlight, for the two years I was taking a break after the fire, no one saw my content therefore my business didn’t thrive.
Regardless, I chose to commit to a year of trying to see if my business could climb back to success status before I decided whether to continue or to give up. During that time, I continued to dye yarn, photograph it, promote it through pictures, a few videos, a few reels, a couple of live videos to show what was coming up in the latest shop update…things I used to do before the fire (with the exception of reels) and it didn’t work like it used to. The engagement was gone. It’s very deflating to have lost the momentum that I had, pre-fire, where a handful of yarn shops were on the wait list to have me in their store. When I had a shop update, I was getting tons of orders and business was thriving. Fast forward, post-fire, two years later and me trying to get my business back up and running felt like I was walking through a deserted town with tumble weeds passing by. I lost the momentum I had and I have struggled to find a method that works to gain any traction back. Maybe I am a creature of habit, well that’s a huge chunk of it, but I do think that it’s much harder to been seen by your followers these days on social media. I am not the only one feeling the strain. I have noticed quite a few Indie Yarn Dyers leave the industry to pursue other interests, getting a full time job or going back to school. I know they loved what they do, but the changes in social media has taken an impact. I am part of an Indie Yarn Dyer Facebook group and it’s something we all talk about. Less traction on our posts, sales slowing down, harder to reach our audience. It’s such a shame because for us creatives, this type of work is also a passion for us. But a passion can go only as far as it’s willing to support you financially. Let’s be real, we can’t do this for free.
So it hasn’t surprised me that the thought of going back to a 9-5 job has popped back into the forefront of my mind. It’s stable, it provides benefits and a peace of mind. However the only aspect it’s lacking is passion and doing something I love. So which do I choose? I am in the middle of that conflict right now. I have applied to a few remote Oncology Medical Coding positions without much luck due to the fact that I quit my last coding job in March 2020 and employers don’t like that I have not worked for three years now in the industry. I quit right before the Pandemic and eventually became a homeschool teacher to my two young boys, like the majority of the world had to face. I have enjoyed that time with my kids immensely. Now that they are back in school, I want to start earning money again and find something to do with the extra time I have. My heart keeps telling me yarn, but my practical brain says “It’s not going to work. You are going to put so much time and effort in it with little reward, so why even try”.
There is more that’s involved that I have to consider when making a decision about the future of my life. Such as, can I see myself dyeing yarn when I am 60? Is that even feasible? Will I get burnt out in the Medical Coding job if it’s something I don’t enjoy doing but earns a decent living? Yarn Dyeing offers more flexibility to be a mother to my two young boys when coding would require more structure.
In the end, I have two choices and it really depends on which happens first. If I get a coding job before I can get my yarn business back up again, then I will put the yarn biz on the back burner. On the flip side, if I can get the yarn biz back up and thriving, by the grace of God and hard work, then I will put the coding career on the back burner. Either way, I firmly believe what is meant for you will be what it turns out in the end. So I will just go with the flow; for now anyway.
Catherine, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I was first introduced to the fiber world at the young age of eight. My grandmother was a crocheter and I wanted to learn. So she taught me, and of course like any young person learning a craft, it’s not going to look great but you are proud of your work. In my college years, I wanted to re-learn, so I took a weekend course at the local college. After that I started crocheting blankets for friends since they were in their twenties, getting married and having babies. Aside from the love of fiber, I also fell in love with color. It started in preschool, I would constantly draw the rainbow or a variation of the rainbow colors on a piece of paper. Then when I was eight or nine I remember sitting on my bedroom floor and using crayons and paper, copying out the silhouette of the night sky line with the sunset colors in the background. That quickly turned into loving to photograph sunsets and sunrises in my late teens and early twenties. Then I came across an opportunity to learn how to dye yarn via a virtual online course in October 2016, before virtual learning was really big. I signed up for the course through Facebook and then got the course materials lists and realized that this was serious business. I probably spent close to $1,000.00 on supplies and I think $250.00 for the course. I instantly fell in love with the process, applying dye to the yarn, blending colors and seeing this magical process take place right in front of me was and still is mesmerizing. Two months later, my husband was doing some research on Etsy and realized that what I was doing was called “Indie Yarn Dyeing” and people sell their creations online such as Etsy. I had no idea. I started researching it myself and became obsessed to say the least. Soon after I realized that I wanted to start my own company and sell on Etsy. So that’s what I did. About four years prior I had reserved a website under the name of www.hookerscorner.com. So that is what I named my company. Hooker is my last name and if you are a crocheter, you use a crochet “hook”. So it made sense and it was catchy and hopefully unforgettable. I had my first sale on December 28, 2016 to a woman, whom I will just use her first name, Jennifer.
Even though I was working a full time Medical Coding job, that I worked starting at 6 am until my eight hours were done, I would dye yarn at night and on the weekends and would even spend my lunch hour taking photographs of yarn, promoting, prepping yarn for that night’s yarn dye session, etc. At that time, there were plenty of other yarn dyers with varying styles of how their product looked. Not as many yarn dyers as there are today, but enough where I had to stand out if I was going to make a name for myself. Luckily I had talent and people liked my product and kept on coming back for more.
After a year of being in business, I started to try and create ‘kits’. A kit is a pre-selected variety of colors picked specifically for a project. A project could be a shawl, cowl, to a garment such as a sweater. It’s hard for people to pick out a variety of colors when looking at a computer or phone screen. So I do the leg work and pick out colors I think would look great together and then snap a few pictures of all of the skeins (yarn) sitting side by side. That way they can see the bigger picture of what all of the different ‘colorways’ would look like together. I would also do live videos so they can see what all of the yarn I have on hand looks like together at one time. Then they can ask questions for me to hold up a few skeins together which might help them make a decision of what to get when my shop update goes live. Also I invite them to message me with questions, including if they want me to put together a kit for them.
After the fire, when I attempted to start my business back up, my new model was to “pay it forward”. So many people had come together to lift my family up, post fire, that I felt the need to do the same in return. So each month, I would take 10% of the profit and donate it to a charity, organization or a person who was doing good in their community. I did that for as long as I could. However once, business started slowing down, I had to stop. But if I ever try for a second time to get my business back up I want to restart that program of giving back. I have donated to companies such as Arbor Day that helps restore the forests that has a trickle down effect to help us in the end, American Red Cross during the COVID Pandemic, Leukemia and Lymphoma Foundation for people with cancer, PrideFoundation.org and Togetherwerise.org, a GoFundMe campaign for a rescue mission in Afghanistan. Lastly but not least to a Principle who worked at North Charleston High School who worked part time at Walmart to help pay bills for current and graduate students and for their college.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
In the early days of starting my business, I was in research mode, looking up and trying to find all of the Indie Yarn Dyers out there to see what they were doing and even how they were running their business. Whether it be how they dyed their yarn, how they promoted themselves to how they packaged their yarn and even trying to see how fast they grew their followers and watching their business grow. There are some benefits to doing this. For one, you’re learning about the industry you are in especially if you are new to it. You are learning the lay of the land. In a sense, I was creating a ‘goal’ in mind of what I wanted to achieve. The down side is that I was in comparison mode and had major imposter syndrome. I didn’t recognize, at that time, that I was just as good as they were; I was just in an earlier stage than they. So I let their success get me down, especially if I wasn’t achieving the same rate of success as they were. What I finally realized is that I am on my own individual path, just like them and their success may look different from mine. And that’s okay!
Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
Marketing has been my biggest obstacle. Besides having a great brand/product, if you don’t know how to market your company successfully, you’re going to struggle. Which is where I am right now. Just two nights ago, I came across an advertisement of a marketing company who, if you pay for their class, will show you how to advertise your company as a way to increase sales that is different than what ‘content creators’ methodology use to build their brand; which is what I think most people try to use that process. Post three times a day, do reels, etc. So I know I will invest in this course as I know it’s the main road block to my success in this new era of algorithms in the social media world.
Contact Info:
- Website: hookerscorner.com
- Instagram: hookerscorner
- Facebook: Hooker’s Corner
- Other: Tik Tok: hookerscorner Email: [email protected]