Our Cinderella Story

So many new customers have joined our YarnXpress.com community and I’d like to take this opportunity to warmly welcome you. This month I’d like to share with you our “Cinderella” story. The first part is an excerpt from a story that was published in many periodicals. The last part brings you up to where (and who) we are today. I look forward to continuing this story as the years progress and I hope that you will be with us, enjoying each consecutive addition.

Here’s our story:

A Stitch Online Saves Nine

Throughout a nineteen-year career as a teacher and administrator in New Jersey's public schools, Assistant Principal Sue Schwartz stayed in touch with her creative side through the knitting she learned from her grandmother, who taught Sue a "passion for these needles and yarns that metamorphosize into glorious tactile fabrics."

In 1998, Ms. Schwartz took her creativity into an unexpected realm: e-commerce. It began with tracking -- and soon posting – yarn auctions on eBay. It developed into a home page from which visitors could order yarns discussed and pictured. Within eight months, it blossomed into an e-store, YarnXpress.com (http://yarnxpress.com). The 1998 entry into cyberspace brought Ms. Schwartz a host of new creative outlets -- digital photography, site design, newsletter writing, online chat, shared online knitting projects.

An eBay Beginning

It was late 1998 when Ms. Schwartz took her creativity online. An expert with pronounced tastes in yarns, she tracked yarn auctions on eBay and noted that they moved "like crazy." So she bought some of her own favorites from a wholesaler open to the public and posted them for auction.

The yarns moved, and Ms. Schwartz, realizing that she had a viable business in development, wrote letters to her favorite yarn manufacturers. Soon, she had relationships with two vendors, and shortly thereafter added two more favorites. By early spring, Sue was selling hundreds of dollars worth of yarn per month -- enough to justify investing in a digital camera in April that enabled her to show the yarns to prospective customers.

E-mailing digital photos to individual customers soon proved too labor-intensive for a woman putting in a very full day at a public middle school. So Sue built a home page hosted on an online community. This was an important step, creating an online presence and streamlining logistics. "The site was colorful, busy and certainly conveyed an upbeat feeling," Sue recalls. "But I had no shopping cart, and again, logistics became overwhelming.”

Going for the Whole Ball of Yarn

It was time to build a fully-enabled e-commerce site. As she had done with supplier relationships, Sue intensively researched the options. She was drawn to freemerchant because of the site's wealth of information that made it clear what was involved in building a store. During her summer vacation, Sue built and launched YarnXpress.com. In August, YarnXpress's first month of operation, sales were way beyond Sue's expectations in what's usually a slow month for yarn sales. YarnXpress.com also developed an online community of newsletter recipients, chat participants, partners in cyber knit projects, and downloaders of free patterns offered on the site.

The Rest of the Story (This part is written by me!!!)

That “story” or portions of it have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, PC Computing, Parade and a variety of other publications. YarnXpress.com pioneered many online concepts related to crafts and web marketing.

Our company has continued to grow due to the support of customers such as you. It has also continued to grow due to the hard work of the YarnXpress.com family. You may be wondering how Lori and Lee became involved with YarnXpress.com.

As YarnXpress.com continued to grow, shipping yarn from my West Milford, New Jersey garage became overwhelming. My sister, Lori, lives in Milwaukee and she volunteered to ship the yarn. I packed it all up, shipped it to her, and this is the reason that our warehouse is in the center of the country.

Lee entered the picture via an innocent email inquiry. He builds, maintains, and actually does magic related to websites. He sent me a letter asking about our host, and the rest is sort of history. We’ve been inseparable ever since the first phone call. Lee does his technological magic from his home in New York City.

Life continued to change for me and I ended up in California. I do all of the purchasing, writing, and web stuff from my office here. I try to stay out of Milwaukee as much as possible and try to get to New York as much as possible.

That’s our story. YarnXpress.com was my dream. It turned into a reality mostly due to the faith, support, and kind words from you, our dear customers. Everything that has happened to us is a direct result of your patronage and input. Thank you for helping me fulfill my dream.

Knit, weave, or crochet like crazy!

Sue@yarnxpress.com