September 2001 was the worst month Ayla Phillips’ 5-year-old store ever had.
“I thought it was going to stay like that,” she remembers.
But she was wrong. “Starting in October, business was up 20 percent over the last year. And it has been like that–a 20 percent increase–ever since,” she says of Ayla’s Originals, her Evanston bead store.
Phillips is not an economic anomaly. While fallout from the terrorist attacks and the Enron-Andersen debacle still are making headlines, small, women-owned craft-related businesses–selling supplies and teaching techniques–are finding that they benefited both from the recession and the cocooning impulses that set in after Sept. 11.
Few entrepreneurs relish the idea of profiting from tragedy, but these businesswomen found themselves well positioned to ride the wave of interest in stay-home-and-save-money activities, like knitting, jewelry-making, bookbinding and other crafts. As a result, they have weathered the economic storm better than a lot of higher-profile businesses that once were considered more successful–and better investments.
The `right business’
At the Hobby Industry Association’s annual convention in Anaheim, Calif., this winter, trend guru Faith Popcorn addressed the audience of mostly female entrepreneurs with this opening line: “You’re in the right business.”
“The whole mood of the place was very upbeat,” says Jane Pollak, owner of An Egg By Jane, an egg-decorating business in Westport, Conn., and author of “Soul Proprietor: 101 Lessons from a Lifestyle Entrepreneur” (The Crossing Press, $14.95). “At some trade shows the aisles are empty right now, but at this one there was a lot of energy.”
While no one has conducted a formal survey on the gender breakdown of craft-centric retailers, Susan Brandt, assistant executive director of Elmwood Park, N.J.-based HIA, says the “substantial majority” are women. Men tend to be executives at the national craft chains, while women tend to own the neighborhood retail businesses and sell crafts on the craft show circuit and through online auctions.
According to HIA research, the overall craft and hobby industry increased 11 percent in 2001, to $25.7 billion. In a poll of U.S. residents, 58 percent participated in crafts in 2001, up from 54 percent in 2000.
The reasons for the boom are as varied as the segments of the industry–quilting, scrapbooking, beading and knitting–that are thriving. Certainly, Sept. 11 played a role. Mary Lee, owner of Beadazzled, an Evanston bead store, searched five distributors to find small safety pins her customers demanded for making beaded flag brooches after the terrorist attacks.
“I ran out of red, white and blue seed beads. I couldn’t get enough small safety pins. These were my regular customers, but they were bringing in their kids and buying different things,” says Lee, who teaches jewelry-making, looming and other classes in the shop she has owned since 1993.
Leona Breck, owner of Ivy Cottage Buttons, a home-based business in Modesto, Calif., that sells handmade decorative buttons for quilters and other crafters, also was overwhelmed by the appetite for Americana.
“Last year was my largest grossing year yet,” says Breck, who saw her sales jump 25 percent to 50 percent each weekend after Sept. 11.
“After Sept. 11, I was fully expecting a downturn because I was expecting people not to spend money on frivolous things,” Breck says. “But I think there are a lot of people who aren’t spending as much on travel who are spending it on crafting.”
Women are not merely beading necklaces or knitting scarves because they have nothing else to do. They do so as a sort of new millennium group therapy, like the women who gathered for a regular weekly class the night of Sept. 11 at Geraghty Heirloom in Arlington Heights.
“I thought everyone would cancel,” said Sharon Geraghty, whose shop teaches handicrafts, including smocking and doll-making. “But they wanted to be here that night, not be isolated.”
Her business is up 12 percent over last year.
Relaxing and therapeutic
“People are not crafting out of financial necessity, but maybe out of emotional necessity,” says HIA’s Brandt, who adds that serious crafters can wind up spending more on supplies than on store-bought items.
“There is something about being with beads that is very therapeutic,” agrees Phillips, who started beading when going through a divorce a decade ago. “There are all these colors, and everywhere you look you see something different. It is relaxing.”
Heather Stanworth, owner of Busy Bee Scrapbooking, which sells albums, adhesives, stickers and other supplies through eBay and its own Web site, started making scrapbooks when her brother died two years ago. “It helped me keep my head above water,” she says, and now suspects that the reason her Delta, Utah-based business is up 60 percent over where it was a year ago is that those who are trying to sort out recent events are doing the same thing.
It is no coincidence that both the business owners and customers involved in these modern-age coffee klatches are primarily women.
“At the risk of sounding sexist, women do connect more easily. Women are the primary buyers, and these businesses are owned by women, so they have that network,” says Priscilla Huff, author of “101 Best Home-Based Businesses for Women” (Prima Publishing, $14.95).
But the craft business boom isn’t attributed solely to reaction to the terrorist attacks. Other trends have contributed to the double-digit gains, and such factors suggest that the industry will be able to sustain the prosperity.
“It would not have happened had the industry not been poised for growth,” Brandt explains.
Both technology and fashion have played significant roles. Desktop scanners make it easier for families to replicate photos, even archival portraits of ancestors, meaning they have extra copies to cut and paste in scrapbooks.
Online archives and color copiers have given scrapbookers easier access to headlines of the day and the ability to incorporate recent events into personal photo albums.
And demographics favor craft CEOs. Adams, Harkness & Hill Inc., a Boston investment banking firm, predicts that sewing, floral and picture-framing craft businesses will post 5 percent to 10 percent gains in the next decade because the population is aging and older consumers have typically been crafters.
Shifting demographics
Like Geraghty and Phillips, Ivy Cottage Buttons’ customer base is mostly women, and in the past has been 34 and older. But in the last several months, Breck has seen younger single women and more women with household incomes greater than $50,000 become interested in quilting. Research from HIA supports the theory that crafters in 2001 tended to have more education and higher income than non-crafters.
Gwynne McClure has noticed similar shifts at CloseKnit, her Evanston knitting shop. “There have been a lot more younger people. I feel like it skipped a generation, and now even kids in grade schools are learning knitting. It is kind of refreshing. They teach it in the Waldorf School here, the public schools, and there are all kinds of knitting clubs.”
For longtime craftswomen like Pollak, the recent boom in craft retail businesses is almost a revenge of the dissed. Retail shops have long been the traditional types of businesses that women open, yet they have been taken less seriously than consulting firms, manufacturing companies and other businesses bankrolled by men. For years, women, particularly those interested in businesses based on hobbies, have had to finance themselves by using personal credit cards or loans from family members, because their businesses were not considered viable loan candidates by traditional lenders.
When McClure bought CloseKnit eight years ago, she knew it would be easier for her to take out a line of credit on her home rather than seek a business loan. Geraghty took on no debt when she opened her handicraft studio, but says she now feels comfortable in approaching lenders about business loans to expand.
“Women’s businesses have long been grass-roots businesses,” Pollak says. “But now, I think people will realize what a huge force they are.”
There’s one more reason these women entrepreneurs aren’t worried about business declining if America gets back to jet-setting and conspicuous consumption: Once a woman successfully finishes a craft project, she’s typically hooked for life.
“Beading is very addictive; once you start, you want more beads,” says Phillips, who plans to launch a mail-order catalog and Web site to feed out-of-town demand later this spring. “In knitting, you just want more yarn. You can put it away for a couple of years, but sooner or later, you’ll pull it back out.”
