What happens when you put a yarn addict in the same room as a yarn rep? Well, last week, after two meetings with two different yarn reps, I found out.
Tuesday afternoon was a meeting with a yarn rep from King Cole Yarn. This company, based out of England, has been around 80 years. It was exciting seeing all the samples the rep showed me, unfortunately, most of what the company had conflicted too much with the yarns we already carry and already sell pretty well.
There was a silver lining, however. One of the other lines I saw from the rep was Happy Fuzzy Yarns. They specialize in hand died yarns and soft gradient yarns. My mouth began to drool as I held the samples and looked through the catalog. How cool it would be to represent this hot trend in the store? We do have some hand painted sock weight, but hand died is huge right now and we don’t have much of it. As it stands right now, there are no nearby local yarn shops within a 30 mile radius that knitters and crochers can frequent. I hope to be able to fill a need for them with a yarn like this. I’m not sure if it’s going to work, but I’m going to see what I can do.
Wednesday afternoon I met with a rep from Premiere Yarns. We carry many items from this line already, so I got to see new ones they were going to release as well as new colors for lines they already had. There was one line that found a resurgence as of late. The Couture Jazz line was originally a ribbon/scarf, but thanks to the chunky yarn trend (such as Loopy Mango) it was being used on size 50 needles to make blankets and cowls. My eyes popped open big at the skeins just thinking about getting some of those in the store.
My week finished out by placing my first Cascade Yarn order. It’s a big responsibility purchasing things for someone else. In this case a store owner. I know they won’t let me go crazy with orders, but they do trust me a lot and I take that seriously. I didn’t bring in any new lines from Cascade, but I will be adding new colors to fill in blanks of things we needed.
This week I will be placing an order for gifts aimed towards yarn lovers. We were defiantly lacking in that department. I’ll post pictures of all those goodies when they come in! Happy knitting – or crocheting.
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