We were lucky to catch up with Lindsey Ross recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Lindsey, thanks for joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
This is a version of the story that I wrote back in 2008 when I opened up shop!
How Yarnia Came To Be…
So I’m opening my own yarn store. But not just any yarn store–a make your own yarn store. I really do have to begin this tale by giving a shout-out here to the magasin behind this madness, La Bobineuse de Laine–or Yarnia Proper, as I now affectionately refer to it.
I first encountered this gem of a store one fateful fall day in Montreal circa 2004, snow already on the ground. In search of a yarn store that was cheaper and less snooty than the one on Rachel and St-Hubert, and more respectable than buying our yarn at Zeller’s, my dear friend Hollis and I trekked down L’avenue du Mont-Royal for 45 minutes, with little forewarning that what we were about to stumble upon would change my relationship with yarn forever.
Fighting against the -40 degree wind chill and berating the website that erroneously implied this store would be on the corner of Mont-Royal and du Parc–an easy bus ride up from McGill–we committed to pressing eastward to the 2200 block, with nothing left to guide us but an address, concluding that this would either be the biggest disappointment and waste of an afternoon ever, or the best-kept secret in Montreal.
As you can probably guess, this place blew my mind. Cottons, acrylics, wools, boucle…even silk and mohair and metallics–boxes of these fibers lined the walls, filled with innumerable colors wound in uneven amounts on cones. My first reaction was disappointment. How could anyone be expected to knit with yarn this fine? I must be too much of an amateur to be shopping here…but then, turning to face the other wall, I realized that I had merely entered a universe that was an entire rung lower on the production chain than most people ever experience yarn.
These single filaments, I realized, piled nearly to the ceiling in boxes of like colors, were single-ply strands of yarn, waiting to be wound into what we everyday hand-knitters recognize as worsted weight commercial yarn. Or really, whatever weight I wanted. The beauty of this store I had discovered was that yarn was sold not by the skein, nor the hank, nor the ball…but by the pound.
Choose your fiber–you want 100% cotton? Half wool, half acrylic so it’s not too itchy? Want to add in a few strands of mohair or silk? Now choose your colors–up to six of them, in whatever combination or ratio you want. And this personalized yarn you just designed, how much do you want–a pound? I watched as the endearing Quebecoise lady who owned the shop loaded my choices onto a machine with surprising dexterity–a machine that looked like it was constructed in this room specifically to trigger the industrial revolution, and had not moved since. It was magnificent.
I watched as–in a matter of seconds–a full pound of my customized yarn was spun onto a cone, slid off the spindle, and handed to me. “Ça va être douze dollars,” she told me, and I gaped back in astonishment. I had, I realized, just stumbled upon the enchanted world of Yarnia.
The preternatural veil of this experience led me to honestly wonder, would I ever be able to find this place again? Is this a one-time deal? I would not have been startled in the slightest to try for a return visit, only to find an entirely different retail block with no sign of this shop ever having existed. In fact, I expected this as a near certainty, so I stocked up and exited with as much yarn as I could carry home.
Well surprisingly, my return venture out to the far stretches of Mont-Royal a month later did not fail me, and for the next four years I swam in a sea of beautiful, custom-blended, obscenely cheap yarn and never set foot in a conventional yarn boutique again.
Fast forward to the summer of 2006 where, having just moved back to the States and my hometown of Seattle, I found myself in a state of panic familiar to any knitter who finds themselves in a new environment, no longer within walking distance to their lifeline LYS. Surely, the duffel bag stuffed to capacity with coned yarn that I had gorged myself on with one last trip to La Bobineuse de Laine and smuggled through customs would last me a good long while…but I needed a sustainable solution.
Turns out, though, that the innovation of what I now affectionately refer to as Yarnia Proper was rarer than I had even realized, as I Google-mapped every yarn store in Seattle and spent my summer trekking to each in eager anticipation of discovering the one that would spin me cheap yarn by the pound. I described the process and what I was searching for to shop owners to be met with blank stares, and learned to leave the car running while I took a mere glance inside the shops, now coming to expect the disappointing array of designer yarns, skeins perfectly stacked in neat square cubbies along the walls, promising a secure and predictable knitting experience, but for a price: $5.99 for a 50-gram ball of 100% cotton?! $17.45 for an 8-ounce hank of Peruvian wool? What if I want to knit something more than a wrist cuff? This cannot sustain my lifestyle.
Well then, if no yarn store in Seattle (or Portland–I checked) can offer me spin-your-own yarn by the pound, I’ll just have to open one myself.
Come, let’s make yarn.
Copyright 2008 by Lindsey Ross.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Yarnia is the only Portland yarn shop where you can design your very own custom yarn blend. You choose the fiber, color, thickness, and amount, and we’ll create your custom yarn for you right on the spot — perfect for knitting, crocheting, or weaving.
Not only that, but our yarn is sold not by the skein, nor the hank, but by the pound.
Don’t know how much yarn you’ll need for a project? Or perhaps you know how many skeins or yards you tend to use, but don’t know how to translate that to ounces? We’ve got lots of tools to help, and can provide email snapshots or physical samples of your yarn before we wind it up, to make sure it’s exactly what you want.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
When I first opened Yarnia, I was also running an annual craft show, called Urban Craft Uprising. At that time, this show was just once a year, and only demanded my attention for about 4-6 months prior to showtime. As Urban Craft Uprising grew, I found myself struggling to juggle both businesses simultaneously (one being a brick & mortar shop with lots of overhead, open hours, staffing, etc., and the other being a large-scale event that drew 15,000 people to a venue in the course of a weekend).
Urban Craft Uprising continued to grow, so much so that it became infeasible to give the attention I needed to both businesses. Sales at my new location of Yarnia had started to decline in 2015 and 2016, so in the fall of 2016 I made the decision to close Yarnia as a brick & mortar and focus on online sales only.
This ended up being the right move, because I was able to move my shop into a spare room at our house which then began to double as both our “Party Room” and my yarn studio, effectively cutting most of my overhead of rent and staffing, and instead turning my business into a tax-deductible operation that I was running out of the home I owned. I still have dreams about having an actual B&M shop and there are times I miss it desperately, but it was the right move both economically and for my own sanity.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
My approach to this business has always been to grow organically and slowly, and thus I’ve never borrowed more than a month’s credit card bill to pay for anything in this business. I scored incredibly cheap rent at my first location, and continued to moonlight by transcribing audio files to make ends meet before the business became profitable (often transcribing there at the shop while I waited for customers to come in!), as well as working on my other aforementioned business, Urban Craft Uprising, which always paid the bills when Yarnia couldn’t.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://customyarn.com
- Instagram: @yarniapdx
- Facebook: @yarniapdx
- Youtube: https://youtu.be/1kZlSVd0KAo
