Knitters, Yarn Raiders, & The Active Lot 🧶

Who knew the knitting community would be so vocal that it would cause the downfall of a startup? 

For well over a decade, the domain Knitting.com had been on sale. Until February 2022, when two e-commerce bros — Dave Bryant and Mike Jackness — calling themselves the EcomCrew, bought the site for $80,000. 

Their goal: to flip the undeveloped domain into a million-dollar business within a matter of years. 

In a podcast, which was supposed to be a “marketing move” to launch the site, Bryant and Jackness described knitting as the “perfect niche” for sales on Amazon. They referred to the competitors in the space as “pretty unsophisticated,” and “a grandma who has the little blog that she’s run for the last 20 years.”

The Backlash: The overt sexism and ageism of the podcast, sparked mass backlash from knitters online. Forums exploded. “Knitting.com is capitalism and sexism at once,” read a post on Indie Untangled. One commenter on subreddit r/craftsnark wrote, “They seem to be labouring under a misapprehension that the knitting community is exclusively made up of technophobic luddite geriatrics.”

So what went wrong? For starters, neither of them had any knowledge of knitting. They simply saw the domain as a way of making a million-dollar startup. Their prejudices about the knitting community, based on lack of research, is what drove the startup to the ground before it even exploded. 

The knitting community has a deep-rooted online network dating back to the 1990s and early 2000s, The Knit List being one of the earliest gathering places. EcomCrew’s purchase of Knitting.com was akin to claiming land in foreign, ancient domain. It didn’t help that the duo acted like conquerors of the space. To knitters online, it felt like an invasion.

The Current Sitch: 

The site has been shunned by knitters, with a tacit agreement in knitting forums to put the site on a black list. So while Knitting.com is still up and running, it is now specifically directed to amateur knitters. It features guides for beginning knitters and tutorials on different stitches.

But the elderly aren’t just more numerous; their finances are healthy and they have less debt. Moreover, retirees received an 8.7% cost-of-living-adjustment bump to Social Security payments in January — to offset last year’s 9.1% inflation peak. Meaning, they are relatively less affected by inflation. 

The lifestyle of seniors has also changed dramatically since 2019—they’re more active than ever. They’re riding e-bikes, hiking, going for concerts and exhibitions, and traveling.

All in all, seniors’ high spending propensities reflect health, wealth and perhaps lingering psychological effects of the pandemic. 

The holiday season/end of the year is around the corner. And with that it’s time for annual predications about shopping, celebrations, retail numbers, decorations, and what not. 

The first on our list of predictors of the year, Adobe Analytics predicts this year’s online holiday sales between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31 will reach $221.8 billion, a 4.8% bump from last year. 

Major driver of sales? The buy now, pay later system that will drive $17 billion in online spending, up from $14.5 billion in 2022.

The report further predicts that certain goods will be on heavy discounts (graph below), with toys being the most discounts at 35%, followed by electronics (30%) and apparel (25%). 

Why is that? Online toy sales skyrocketed last year by 206%, followed by video games (115%), and clothing and accessories (94%). So this year’s discounts are a direct result of last year’s shopping trends. 

But there’s a good chance these goods will be out of stock soon. Because holiday shopping is predicted to start as early as mid-October this year.

But Adobe isn’t the only one researching these trends. Deloitte’s September report estimates that this year’s holiday sales will rise between 3.5% and 4.6%. E-commerce sales are expected to rise between 10.3% and 12.8%, per Deloitte’s report.

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