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Experiences is a podcast about humans creating happy memories through their participation in the experience economy. We discuss how brick and mortar retail is changing rapidly, the clear winners in the experience economy, and visit with brands that are not just surviving, but thriving.
Hello, listeners. This is Mark Sandeno of The Experiences Podcast. Did you know that the US yarn industry is huge? It generates around 2 and a half $1,000,000,000 annually. Of course, this includes everything from yarn sales to knitting needles, patterns, and related accessories.
Mark Sandeno:But what is maybe not tracked is the amount of money and revenue that goes into businesses for yarn based experiences and things like the Midwest Fiber Festival. Today, I had the pleasure of speaking with Heather Swan, aka the yarn queen, about her business, Yarncom. It was a delightful conversation. She talked about where she came from, some of the challenges, why she took the risk of going from comfortable corporate career into being a Yarntrepreneur. I just made that up just right then, but I think it's good.
Mark Sandeno:Yarntrepreneur, that's gonna stick. So sit back and enjoy this podcast conversation, and we'll see you on the other side. Welcome to the experiences podcast. It is my pleasure to be hosting Heather Swan, the yarn queen. And you can see as evidenced by her tiara, she is living up to the name Heather, AKA the yarn queen.
Mark Sandeno:Thank you for joining us today.
Heather Swan:Thank you, Mark, for having me. I'm very excited about the conversation and all the great stuff that you guys do to help us be able to serve our customers.
Mark Sandeno:Well, thank you very much. Today, what we're gonna try to get the human story behind your startup because it's a relatively new endeavor. You know, where did you come from? Why are you doing this? What is Yarncom all about?
Mark Sandeno:And am I saying that right? Is it Yarncom, or how do you refer to the business itself?
Heather Swan:You call it Yarncom is what it's called. Yarncom came out of wanting to create a space for fiber artists to be able to build community. Yarn is the thing that ties us all together. Our tagline is community through creation, and we really try to encourage people to knit, crochet, weave, spin, belt, going down that fiber arts rabbit hole of creativity, but also being able to support one another in life's endeavors. So often, we have people that come in and we ask, you know, well, what got you started?
Heather Swan:And, I mean, we've had people say, well, my counselor told me I needed to do this for my mental health or it just helps me to really relax and to process things. And so we love being able to be that space for them. And then also you have your makers who just absolutely love to make things and make things for friends and for themselves. So that is where it kind of came into birth here in the Saint Louis region, also at a time when yarn shops were starting to close because owners were getting to retirement age and they were ready to pass the torch on. And for one reason or another, passing their specific shop torch on wasn't either the right timing or just couldn't happen.
Heather Swan:And so as I was coming out of 25 plus years in the corporate world, working in administrative and management type of roles, planning national sales meetings and special events and marketing and sales analytics and just all the different things coming out of that, knowing that I wanted to step into a space where I was building something for myself and something for my local community and a place where when I win the lottery, I can just go hang out.
Mark Sandeno:That's great. That's some great background. A few things that you shared brought up a few things that I find to be really interesting. 1st is the fact that there is this I think it's coined the silver tsunami of retirees leaving their small businesses. And a lot of these businesses apparently aren't salable.
Mark Sandeno:They have value in the community. They're creating revenue and cash flow and even modest or significant profits, but they're not positioned to sell. Did you, before you opened your yarn experience, I would just use the word experience, did you see that? Were you aware of that trend, or is it something that you realized after the fact?
Heather Swan:I actually was aware of the fact that there were a couple of shops here in the Saint Louis region specifically that seemed like the owners were starting to get to an age where they might be wanting to look to sell. It definitely would have had some value. Unfortunately, though, one of them was right when the pandemic was hitting. I also, at that moment in time, was not in a place where I had joked about it with friends like, oh, that would be fun to buy it, but I wasn't in a space where I was like, I'm ready to go do this thing. It was a year later that I had some health stuff that happened with my husband, and that's what accelerated me into it.
Heather Swan:So the timing for me was off, but I knew that there was opportunities there. I think that, honestly, this is a conversation that I have with a lot of new newer small business owners, especially someone like me who is establishing something in a brick and mortar setting where people are physically walking the the owner was 90 years old when she retired. And I said, I won't work till I'm 90. I love her to death. And she hung on for as long as she could.
Heather Swan:And I'm just like, oh my gosh, that is wild. And on a sidebar, some people were like, I can't believe she closed. And the thing was, was she was in a building where the owner was not going to renew the lease. So if someone had tried to buy her business, it would've been a totally different location. They would've had to have moved.
Heather Swan:There would've been a lot of stuff to go along with that. I think that's part of the thing that, as small business owners, we see people with passion who are jumping in there and creating something and, like you said, creating something for their community. There isn't that longer term, how do I perpetuate this without it staying in the family? How do I make this into something that someone else can come in and take over? And so part of the role of Yarncom is that it is a idea that came to me and came to several other people, but I am birthing it in the way that I feel authentic to myself and to the messages that I feel like I'm getting intuitively.
Heather Swan:Like, this is what I need to be doing. And through doing that, I'm also very much aware of the fact that there will be a next generation. I am preparing a brand that I will be able to hand over to whoever, whatever that looks like in the future. Because the hardest part about all of this is when you're building a business where you are building up a community around you, when you close the doors, that community has nowhere to go. Then it causes a breakdown even further and has reverberations out because people who used to go there every week, now they can't go there because that place is closed.
Heather Swan:So now they have to find a different place and everyone's coordinating and and it's creating a whole lot of other stuff that people don't really understand in the general population if they're not aware of the fact that these small businesses across the US, this is what they do. They are the fabric of America as the cotton brand would say, but it really is something that ties us all together. So as a small business owner, trying to figure out how to make your brand in a way that someone would be able to come in and say, I want to have a local yarn shop, in my case. I want to do the things that you do. And then I can say, here is my template.
Heather Swan:Here's everything I do. Here are all the records. Here's everything. Sell it to them. And then I can go off and be married and then they can walk in and have a bunch of things already established and figured out that I've already figured out for them.
Mark Sandeno:There's a few things that I like to talk about in my interviews with my customers, whether I'm recording them or not. And experiences as a baseline for how I approach these conversations, we have thousands of business users all over the world, and there's a surprising similarity across all these users all over the world regardless of the kind of retail or bookable retail is what we call it business they run. And it's kinda centered around this reality that in the modern era, you don't have to leave your home to buy anything. So if I wanna buy yarn or yarn supplies, I can come to, online store like Yarncom, and I can buy that stuff. But what gets us out of our homes?
Mark Sandeno:It is the opportunity to be in community, creating positive memories together. And there's some really interesting psychological science behind this. I think the Happiness Institute published some of this that positive memories actively alleviate anxiety. As I was looking up knitting, I have this quote here, knitting boasts numerous health benefits, which might surprise many. It's known to reduce stress and anxiety, improve fine motor skills, and even lower blood pressure.
Mark Sandeno:So I may need to take up knitting. Surprisingly let's see. What are the statistics? 71% are female, but there's almost 30% of knitters are male. And it appears to be experiencing a huge renaissance.
Mark Sandeno:And so you are expert at not only creating a theme and a brand around this hobby. You're good at creating community and bringing people together. And now you're talking about this retirement plan or this exit plan or scale plan being taking what you do, packaging it up, and reproducing it for others. Before we talk about doing that for others, how has it gone for you since, I think it was 2021, you mentioned your husband had an illness and that changed your career? And then, partially, as a response to that, you launched Yarncom.
Mark Sandeno:How has it gone? By the way, don't skimp on the pain, because what I have found in my own life and in the life of people who listen free to free to unpack that.
Heather Swan:I spent 25 years building dreams for other people. I had worked in a variety of different places throughout my tenure as an employee with others and stuff like that. And so I had taken a position with a startup company that it was a long established mom and pop brand that had gotten purchased by some people and it was in pharmacy, and they were taking a whole new approach to compounding pharmacy. And they were in the wild, wild west, and they were establishing rules, and they were negotiating contracts in making really, what I would say, ethical and responsible choices for all parties involved, for the customers, for the doctors.
Mark Sandeno:Compounding pharmacy is a pharmacy that creates the formulations in the actual pharmacy in front of the customer instead of just getting a bunch of bottles and pills and portioning them out.
Heather Swan:Yes. So thinking about any time that you have a medication that has to get altered in some way, it falls under the umbrella of compounding pharmacy. I loved working for them, but it was a lot of hours. It was a lot of hard work. And through several different things that happened with that organization, they ended up closing and I started consulting.
Heather Swan:And then one of my former bosses had sought me out and hired me to be his general manager for his startup company. So I kept working with these startup companies and helping them get going, but I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off, and I wasn't taking care of myself and I was raising children and trying to balance everything and balance the expectations of my boss and the other executives and the owners, and then also balance the expectations of my employees and how can I be making sound decisions for both parties to make sure that we're all on the same page, but we're all taking care of each other?
Mark Sandeno:Could I ask a question about that? It sounds like you're a really important operator for people who are doing startups. You were the right hand person. You were doing everything that needed to be done to take these nascent, almost nothing businesses and become thriving businesses. Is that kind of the role you play?
Mark Sandeno:I mean, you used the word manager, but it really sounds like you were a key person, to help deliver, you know, really important outcomes as far as growth and sustainability.
Heather Swan:Yes. And it took me a while in the moment You're doing the work. You've got your head down. You're like, I need to do this thing. I need to produce this report.
Heather Swan:But I started having a track record of creating tools and being able to create outlines of accountability that helped the organization be able to make financial decisions and to strategize and to implement that with the key staff that were going to drive sales and everything like that. But operationally, I have that brain where I can take stuff, I can pull it apart, organize it, kind of like a mechanic, very mechanically minded. I can look at something from all different angles, go high level, go into the minutiae, and then determine like, okay, this is the thing that we need to do next in order to make x, y, z happen. And when you're in the moment, I was also not in the head space to really recognize the value I was bringing to the table. I think that's important because sometimes when you get so caught up in the minutia of everything, you're like, I just gotta get this done.
Heather Swan:I just gotta get this done. I just gotta get this done. And you're so focused on the doing and the task management that taking that moment to step back and be like, wow, I made that happen. Or because I was here at this moment at this time, I was able to influence this thing here, which made that go to the next level. When I had started with the compounding pharmacy at one point, I had someone tell me, Heather, you know you'll never have to interview for a job again.
Heather Swan:And I looked at them like, that's a weird thing to tell somebody. But when I reflect back now at what she was trying to tell me was you have now connected yourself with so many people that if you want to do something, you just need to pick up the phone, and you will be able to find the right fit for you. So I've been extremely fortunate.
Mark Sandeno:Yeah. Let's dig into how you took that experience as this clutch startup person. At one point, you said no more. I'm gonna do a thing for me. Did those relationships pay off?
Mark Sandeno:Were you able to leverage those, or did you say goodbye to all those connections and what you'd already established?
Heather Swan:A lot of those connections, because we're not in the same industry at all, have gone away because what they're focused on is so different than what I'm focusing on. But I do have a business mentor who is also a dear friend and we have now progressed to more of this mutual support type of relationship. She has a startup that she's working on. She has several different things happening. There's a reason why we're friends because we like to do multiple things.
Heather Swan:She has been someone who I can talk to about the top things that I need to do. It's been really helpful because when you are a small business owner, no matter how many employees you have, when the buck stops with you, it can feel like you're on an island. And so talking to other business owners or talking to other people who are in roles where they're making these high level decisions that are affecting strain in making those decisions. As you've heard in, strain in making those decisions.
Mark Sandeno:As you've heard in this interview, we're talking to retailers that host people. And how do you do that? Well, there has to be a way for people to book their experience with you. It's our contention that the world needs another booking tool like it needs another hole in its head. That's not what we need.
Mark Sandeno:What we need is a platform for bookable retail, and that's what the experience app is all about. In just a few clicks, if you happen to be a Shopify ecommerce user, you can add bookable experiences to your website. They're on brand. It's at your domain. It's done through the Shopify checkout, and you control the data right there in the admin.
Mark Sandeno:You can transfer customers. You can create scannable QR codes. They can be reminded of their upcoming experiences, and it integrates really nicely with everything you do as a retailer. So you're selling your products right next to your bookable experiences, and you don't have to use things like Eventbrite or Ticketmaster or one of the other 1,000 bookable tools out there. If you want the tool that works for you as you host people in your retail environment, which quite frankly is pretty much table stakes these days in an era where people don't have to leave their home to buy anything.
Mark Sandeno:They're gonna come out to create a memory with you. Go to experiencesapp.com for a free 14 day trial. It doesn't require a credit card to do the 14 day trial. And by the way, if the 14 day trial isn't long enough, just hit us up in the in app chat and we'll extend it for you. So thanks for listening.
Mark Sandeno:Experiencesapp dotcom. Go there today. Add it to your Shopify store. And if you're not already a Shopify entrepreneur, this would be a great time to start. Go to shop ify.com, get your store going, and then immediately go over and add the experiences app to your store.
Mark Sandeno:Once again, this is Mark Sandino, the CEO of Experiences. We hope to see you soon. I'm interested in how set up you were in the compounding pharmacy world with that network, and then you decided to do this new thing. That's a risk. A lot of people are not willing to do that.
Mark Sandeno:Sometimes entrepreneurs like you say, well, anyone can do this. And just here's the things you need to remember. I tend to agree that most people, if they set their mind to it, they can do it. But one of the things we forget to acknowledge is at one point, you went from being pretty set up and pretty well known into this whole new thing. That was a huge risk.
Mark Sandeno:How did that feel?
Heather Swan:Terrifying. It was absolutely terrifying. My friends and I had talked about doing a festival in Saint Louis. My friends and I had talked about doing a yarn shop. But it's different when you're sitting on the back dock drinking a glass of wine with your friends, knitting on something then actually going to the bank and saying, okay, here is my savings and I'm gonna sign off on all of these different things.
Heather Swan:And, oh, yeah, by the way, honey, to my husband, like, are you okay if we take all this money and dump it into this thing here? And I cannot say this enough, is that surrounding yourself with people that support you, that believe in you, and that hold you accountable is what has helped me so much. But walking into my first trade show, I was so nervous. And, like, the first time I was telling people that I was opening a yarn shop, and some of them I knew, but I really didn't know anybody in the fiber arts community in Saint Louis. I wasn't really plugged into all of that.
Heather Swan:And I was terrified, like, what if nobody shows up? What if nobody wants to take my classes? What if I can't get any instructors? The what ifs, the imposter syndrome, whatever you wanna call it, was very strong at times. And it still, like, comes up periodically because I'm still really new in the industry.
Heather Swan:I've not been in the industry for two and a half years, technically. It is still weird when people say that my reputation, like on the festival side as a festival organizer, I get people that are talking about me at festivals across the country and I get messages like, hey, when does applications open? And I've heard you run a great festival. I mean, just all of this feedback that feels kind of weird because two and a half years ago, literally nobody knew who I was, except this girl in Saint Louis who is passionate about yarn and is opening a yarn shop and starting a festival.
Mark Sandeno:That's an amazing story. Let's jump back just a little bit to that moment when you decided to go all in, you're talking with your husband. I assume he had an answer for you when you said, are you okay with this? I assume it was, yeah, let's do this. Right now, you can look back, even though, as you mentioned, you deal with a little bit of imposter syndrome.
Mark Sandeno:I think everybody does. That moment when you pull the trigger, ink on paper, I'm making this commitment. We're getting this retail space where fixtures or whatever it takes. Did you have any idea what the journey was gonna be like? And I'll ask you 2 questions.
Mark Sandeno:1, how much better or worse is it than you thought it was gonna be? And 2, one antidote, a moment where you were doing a class or a conversation you had with someone where you said, this is going to have a huge impact. I am so glad I'm doing this.
Heather Swan:Okay. So first, the moment of impact He went into He went into the hospital on April 1st that year, and we honestly didn't know if he was gonna live or die. And it was, if the treatment doesn't work, then you have a few months left. If the treatment works, he could live out a normal life. And the odds were not in his favor.
Heather Swan:The strains that he had, everything that he had going on, the odds were not in his favor. We knew that he was gonna have to have a bone marrow transplant, so then we had to start the process for finding a donor for that. But we were extremely fortunate because by July that year, he had his bone marrow transplant. But by July that year, don't get me wrong. My company, they took such good care of me.
Heather Swan:I was in an upper management role and I went to the CEO and I said, I can't fulfill the responsibilities of this. Here are the responsibilities I can do while I'm dealing with this, and here are the things I can't do. There was zero hesitation. It was like, well, we're you just take care of you and you take care of your husband and we've got your back. And, I mean, it was absolutely amazing.
Heather Swan:But then as I was doing it, I was like, I can't do this anymore. I can't keep doing this for other people. I've known that and I felt like I have been getting these messages over and over, but I just kept pushing through going, no, no, no. That's not it. This was the final one where I was I felt like I was 45 at the time.
Heather Swan:I was like, if I don't do this, I'm gonna continue to not take care of myself. I'll probably have a heart attack at 50. I'll probably be dead by 52. Like, this isn't the way to handle life, and this isn't what you should be doing. So my husband is going through all his treatment.
Heather Swan:He's been all of these drugs. He's literally out of his mind half the time. He's just thankful to be breathing because of all the stuff he was dealing with. And so when I made the decision, it was right before he was going in to get his bone marrow transplant. And I made the decision not to talk to him about it until after his transplant was done and, like, we had seen that it was working and that the cells were grafting.
Heather Swan:And when everything was going really good, then I was like, okay. I literally can't do all of this anymore. And I told him where my heart was with everything and that I wanted to have more freedom and I understood it would impact our lifestyle. And I understood we wouldn't be able to go get Mexican at our favorite place 3 times a week or whatever it was at that point. And, like, we were gonna have to make some drastic changes, but that I felt compelled to figuring out whatever this is.
Heather Swan:But I know that this is where I'm supposed to be. I tell him, like, he was drunk on whatever the chemotherapy was and stuff, and he was like, that sounds great, babe. You've got this. But he's always been like that. Whenever I've gone to him and said, I think I wanna make this move in my career or I think I wanna do that thing, he has always been my number one cheerleader right out of the gate.
Heather Swan:At first, he was, like, looking at me like I had 12 heads and he likes to bicycle. So I was like, I know this will impact your bicycling, but we'll figure it out. Like, you'll still get your all your bicycles and stuff. But being able to take a step back and have the courage to say, no. This is what I need to do and talking it through with my business mentors.
Heather Swan:I went to her and I said, okay. This is what I'm gonna do. And usually the first reaction I would get when people would say, you're gonna do what? You're gonna open a yarn shop? What are you talking about?
Heather Swan:With my first festival, 3 of my friends were like, we wanna help you. We wanna help you do whatever. They joked, but they told me afterwards, they were like, oh, look at our cute little friend. She wants to have a little yarn festival. There'll be a couple of 100 people there.
Heather Swan:There were over 750 people.
Mark Sandeno:Did you start the Midwest Fiber Festival?
Heather Swan:Yes. I did.
Mark Sandeno:And you're known as the head fiber freak among your other monikers of being the yarn queen at the Midwest Fiber Festival. So just to interrupt your origin story a little bit, not only did you start a retail spot, and you probably did some research to know that, you know, as much as your friends are kind of like, oh, that's so cute that, you know, yarn in the hobby is over $3,000,000,000 a year. Monthly spend per household on these crafts is about $21, and that's actually pretty amazing. It's a real big market. Did you have a good idea of how big the opportunity was, or were you responding to the enthusiasm you were feeling from people?
Mark Sandeno:You're, like, really stacking your work here. You have this festival and you have a retail environment. What were you thinking?
Heather Swan:I actually was doing market research for the retail space. I had requirements for what I needed in order for it to be a viable space for me to be at. And for the festival, I also had some requirements for where it needed to be hosted libraries. And in this day and age, you can go to your local library, at least here in Saint Louis. There's a great librarian, small business librarian at Kirkwood Library, Mel, who I've actually known for way longer than just the last couple of years.
Heather Swan:But your library has access to databases that are used for doing market research. So if you're a market research company, you're gonna go out on these databases and stuff. You can do that for free. And you can go out and you can look at the average household incomes of an area by ZIP code by I mean, you can hone it in pretty tight. You can look at what interests do they have.
Heather Swan:Are there crafts and hobby? You can cut up that information in so many different ways and you can do it for free. It just takes your time of doing the market research. So I did market research. Mel helped me identify the databases and kind of work through them, spent an hour on a Zoom call with her, and she was able to help me kinda get on my way.
Heather Swan:And then I did further research so then I could make sure that my target, which I had already kind of figured out where I wanted it to be the region and stuff like that, but I still wanted the confirmation. And all of the research that I did confirmed that the locations I was looking at were viable locations for what I wanted. It had to have good parking. It had to have good lighting. People had to feel safe being able to walk in and out because I knew I wanted to have evening events.
Heather Swan:I didn't want them to feel like they were walking out somewhere where maybe they didn't feel safe or they couldn't see because the lights weren't on and stuff like that. And I also in our region where we are in St. Louis, I call it a pass through location because we have a lot of people that live in Saint Louis County and Saint Charles County. There are a couple of arteries that go in and out of the counties. So I wanted to be along one of those so that when people were traveling in and out for work or in and out for activities and they needed to make that quick stop because they needed something for their project, I would be on their way.
Heather Swan:Being someone who commuted to offices for so long and not having a yarn shop until it was 2018, 19 that I could actually stop in at and grab, like, the needles I needed or the yarn or some tool or a crochet hook, whatever that was. Those were all things that I felt like were really important to having the location in the right spot. And so market research, contact your library, and you can get lots of free stuff. It does take your time. You have to be willing to commit to having some time set aside for that.
Mark Sandeno:Yeah. That's fantastic. I'm looking at midwest Fiberfest.com. Obviously, I have your site up, yarncomstl for Yarncon Saint Louis. There's a convergence.
Mark Sandeno:Right? It's all about community, both places. The Fiber Festival looks like it just ended. It was in April. How many people showed up this year to the Fiber Festival?
Heather Swan:We had over 1800 people come through the doors.
Mark Sandeno:Wow. Could you have imagined that when you envisioned doing this?
Heather Swan:Actually, yes. St. Louis didn't have a festival like this. St. Louis has a rich history of festivals, but not one dedicated only to the fiber arts.
Heather Swan:I knew I would be able to see it grow. I keep seeing this. I'm like, when I started all of this, when you're talking about the human side of it, because we talk about anxiety and, like, when you're starting something up and you're jumping in and you're like, I don't know what's gonna happen happen and nobody knows me. And are they gonna wanna come to my shop, gonna wanna be at this festival? Can I get vendors here?
Heather Swan:Can I get instructors? I kept telling myself, here in Missouri, people call them float trips. Other areas of the country, they might call them something different, but it's where you either have an inner tube or a kayak or a canoe, and you get on a river and you float down the river for the day. I kept telling myself, I'm on a float trip. I'm on the inner tube.
Heather Swan:I need to stop trying to hang on to everything on the sides of the river, and I need to let the river take me to where it's going. For the festival, it is daunting to think of it to continue to grow. But when I first started it, I was like, I know I can grow this to about 2 to 3000 people. I can see that absolutely happening beyond that. I don't know where it's gonna go.
Heather Swan:I don't have a desire for that to be the biggest thing, but I also try to respect and honor the fact that the Midwest Fiber Festival, I treat it like it's its own entity. It's its own energy. It is its own thing. So as it is continuing to grow, my role and responsibility is to make sure we have the support in place in order for it to become what it is meant to be. So
Mark Sandeno:I did look up other festivals. The most prominent of which is the Sheep and Wolf Festival in Rhinebeck, which has over 30,000 attendees and 300 vendors. So these things can get large. I mean, that's a big experience. That's not in your aspirations to be the Midwest equivalent of that?
Mark Sandeno:Or
Heather Swan:No. The idea of 300 vendors to have to wrangle, Absolutely not. Like, I mean and then just finding a location to put all of them, that makes my heart. Yeah. No.
Heather Swan:I wanna have the best experience for people in the Midwest that are interested in the fiber arts, but I don't always necessarily attribute bigger is better. Sometimes bigger is bigger. And so I want it to be the size that it needs to be, but I want it to be what it is, which is a celebration of fiber arts in the Midwest and specifically because I'm greedy in my backyard. I don't wanna have to travel.
Mark Sandeno:One of the things I love so much about the experience economy, which is defined by sports, entertainment, travel, and dining, I have the privilege of interacting with what we call the long tail or the shadow experience economy. The experience economy is really people saying, I care more about experiences than I care about the stuff that's involved in the experiences. And so what we see a lot of is experiences like yours, candle making workshops, cooking schools, cooking classes, sitting right next to the consumption of goods, sometimes just retail goods. I can come in, I can buy some supplies, or I can just consume something. But a lot of these, you'll never hear of these businesses.
Mark Sandeno:The owners are thriving financially because people pay a premium for memory creation. I think one of the greatest examples of that is candle making workshops. They're incredibly low tech, and you can get a candle almost free shipped to you the same day. I mean, they're so cheap, but people pay a premium to go and craft this thing. So just kinda going from where your guardrails are for your aspirations.
Mark Sandeno:Just because you don't wanna have a big fiber festival doesn't mean your aspirations aren't huge. When you think about helping people create durable memories that are positive and transforming your community, how big are your aspirations? Not necessarily in size, but what impact do you wanna have?
Heather Swan:The impact I wanna have is what we are already having. Earlier this spring, I was invited to one of my customers' weddings. She's getting married next week. She invited me and I was blown away because I see her regularly, but I never thought, like, she wanted to have me at her wedding. Like, that really hit me in a place that I was just like, holy cow.
Heather Swan:And then when we do stuff like we did a surprise bachelorette party. So I put together a macrame activity for everyone to do. They were all crafters and we set up the shop and we had it all staged. And when she was walking into the shop, she's going out on a date with one of her girlfriends and her girlfriend said, oh, Heather's got something for me at the shop. I need to go get it.
Heather Swan:So they come walking in and everything. And she said, well, if my date night ended up at Yarncom, I really wouldn't be sad about it. It was like when I was told that, like, I got goosebumps because I was just like, oh my gosh. That is incredible. When I sit around the table and I hear people talking about how they transplanted to Saint Louis and they were having problems finding friends that do the same thing they do.
Heather Swan:And now that they come to our stitch groups, they have that. Or we will host events where we partner with one of the other craft businesses here in our shopping center. They do pottery. So they brought everything down here and we all painted yarn bowls together. And she was like, well, you guys can do it down at our studio.
Heather Swan:And I said, yeah, but they wanna do it together as fiber artists. No offense to your studio. But, like, they wanna be in this space. They wanna be looking at the yarn and they wanna be inspired by it, and then they wanna be here. And she was like, I totally get it.
Heather Swan:You know, that is one of those experiences, like you said, like, they could have paid a lot less for yarn bowls even at the yarn festival. And they're gorgeous bowls, but they could've paid a lot less for what they did. But it was the experience of being together and being inspired with one another. So every day, I feel like I just live out the best life because I get to see already the impact that we're having on the community and getting the feedback of how it is that we are really pouring into our local community and our community at large in the fiber arts and encouraging people to make things and to find one another and to support one another. So for me, that is a huge part of what I feel is really cool about the impact that we're making.
Heather Swan:And we're moving into our next stage of what I call impact and what you are talking about experiences is that we've been trying to figure out, okay, how do we do experiences for the novice, for the person who wants to come do the one project and walk out and they don't really wanna get into it. And so we formulated our plan. We've got it all together. Now we've got kits and we've got stuff on our calendar, and we're starting to schedule it. And it is making an impact because people are walking and going, you know, I would have never walked in here, but now that you're having this event, this is a blast.
Mark Sandeno:And I think there's a great story for any retailer who's considering or already doing bookable retail stuff. You know and I gotta be honest, just to jump to the left just a little bit here. Yarn people sometimes seem crazy and insane. They are so passionate.
Heather Swan:We love it.
Mark Sandeno:They will be in the strangest places knitting, and you're just like, what the? Appealing to that person and just being a resource in the community. On one hand, it's low hanging fruit. But as a retailer or a small business owner entrepreneur, you're saying, well, wait a second. How can I take what's so great about this?
Mark Sandeno:Leverage the reality that people are simply looking for things to do outside their home, but make this whole craft super accessible. I've gotta be honest. In my research on yarn because we have a lot of workshops. We have a number of yarn customers who are gonna listen to this as well, and I've looked at them. You know, I'm like, I wanna understand this a little bit.
Mark Sandeno:And then I'm looking at some of these sites where the patterns are and what people are. And I was like, you know, it would actually be really cool to be able to make things out of yarn. It seems really cool. So I'm kind of monologuing here, but the question I have for you is, you know who that core fanatic customer is. You're lowering the bar to make it super accessible to brand new people.
Mark Sandeno:What's the motivation there? Is it to bring the joy of knitting or fiber arts? Is it to grow your top line revenue and your profits? Is it all of those things? When did that occur to you, and why really are you doing that?
Heather Swan:So the answer is yes to everything you said, but I'll break it down a little bit more. So one thing, my personal passion, I am a coach at heart. When I was in high school, I coached youth sports. I had to give up coaching youth volleyball last year because after opening the shop, it was too much. But that was part of my passion.
Heather Swan:I love coaching people and seeing the spark of, oh my gosh, I just got it. That moment, that excitement that they get, and the confidence that begins to build after they continue to have win after win, whatever that is. Their stitches look consistent. They created a cowl that fits them perfectly. They made a baby hat and the baby is able to wear it.
Heather Swan:Like, whatever that is. That's one part. The second part, when we're talking small business, we're talking about revenue generation. When you're a brick and mortar, you need feet through that door. The more foot traffic you have, the higher your sales are gonna be.
Heather Swan:I could go find all of the research I want to support that, but we all know that. Like, the more foot traffic you have, the higher your sales are going to be. So what you need to do is put something in front of them to make it accessible. We have beginning crochet and knitting classes. We limit it to 6 people because when you're teaching a beginner, it takes a lot of attention from the instructor at certain points in that class and we don't wanna throw 10 people in a room and only have 3 of them have a really great experience.
Heather Swan:So we limit it to 6 people, but we keep selling out. And so we add extra dates. We have our once a month classes that are scheduled. And then if we start getting too far booked out with them, then what we'll do is we will update we have, like, what we call our backup dates. And so then we'll throw another class in there because people want to learn.
Heather Swan:I cannot stress enough, advanced classes are great. And yes, you make money and yes, it generates it. The advanced classes, you can't run those every month. You can't run the same intro to brioche every single month. You're not going to fill it.
Heather Swan:But you can do it for beginning classes if you're in a large metro area like where we are. And by creating those beginning makers, you are now creating a new customer. Because if they have a good experience in your shop, they're going to tell other people about their experience. They're going to continue to come in and then they're going to start to take those next step classes. And so it to me, it's all about building up that continual revenue.
Heather Swan:So I'm planting the seed for someone today and then watching it continue to grow over the course of the next 12 months. And we offer not just like that beginning class, but then we have other classes that support those beginning makers. When people take those classes, they end up walking out blown away. Even my makers who've been making forever, they're like, well, I'm just gonna take this class because I gotta see what the heck she's talking about. And they walk away and they're like, oh my god, Heather.
Heather Swan:Are you like, that was so helpful. And I'll look at them like, you've been doing this for 20 years. How was that helpful to you? Like, how did you? But, I mean, that is the thing is that providing that continual that that continually brings them in your door.
Heather Swan:And then guess what? They're gonna keep buying from you. They're going to look to you for that. In fact, this week on Wednesday, I had one of our regular stitchers. I was teasing them.
Heather Swan:One of them said she's going on vacation. And another one said, oh, have you checked out all the yarn shops? And I was walking by and I said, you're gonna cheat on me? Are you kidding me? I was teasing.
Heather Swan:But one of the other ones was like, well, I pretty much exclusively only shop from you anymore, Heather. And I was like, that's so sweet. But I mean and she travels and she goes to festivals and she does lots of things. And so that to me was very impactful in my heart because I was like, she values this community so much. She's gonna do whatever she can to make that investment.
Heather Swan:So
Mark Sandeno:There's a couple of things that you're doing I'd like to point out to our listeners here. 1 is the hedge you have or the moat you've created is this incredible sense of community where your customers are actually saying things like that. If you have a competitor or any business has a competitor, and they're just kind of setting out stuff to buy and hanging things on the wall, And maybe there's no theater because you do. There's a degree of theater at Yarncom, the yarn queen, your cool glasses, the tear, the whole thing. Well, I don't know if research this, but it helps people form positive memories around the thing you offer.
Mark Sandeno:It's a key principle of the experience economy, and it's outlined by Joseph Pines and Gilmore who wrote the book, The Experience Economy, staging, theater. It creates better durable memories.
Heather Swan:I just wanna pause super quick and just say I have not read that book, but now I'm going to go read that book because I am just naturally like this. And so and now I wanna see what that research does. Anyway, I find that fascinating, but not surprising.
Mark Sandeno:It's basically the Bible of people who are into offering experiences. And it was written 20 years ago, and it's more relevant today than it was then. The other thing that you're doing that I think is really interesting for anyone listening is you're saying, yes, here are my customers, but I need a lower cost, lower lift, lower friction way to introduce more people to the value of x, y, and z, the thing I do. And you have foresight and vision for how you can unpack and develop that customer. Maybe that intro to knitting class is lower cost, and it's nonthreatening, and and maybe it's not a big revenue generator for you, but you know that lifetime value of that customer is gonna be many multiples.
Mark Sandeno:And because of how you create community, they're gonna bring in more customers. They're gonna bring their friends in. It's amazing.
Heather Swan:It is amazing. That's very cool.
Mark Sandeno:We're running out of time. I have all so many questions, but instead, what I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna ask you one of a question I'm gonna ask. I'm I'm gonna test this out on you. I wanna ask all my future interview subjects. I'm gonna do 2.
Mark Sandeno:No wrong answers. Okay. So if you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice before starting this journey, what would it be?
Heather Swan:Hire the virtual assistant. The money that you're gonna put out for that VA is way less expensive than you doing all of that leg work upfront.
Mark Sandeno:Even if it's a stretch financially?
Heather Swan:Even if it's a stretch financially because what it will do is it will give you the opportunity to be out there selling, looking for other opportunities to make money, maybe grant writing if you have the opportunity to apply for some grants, something like that, to be able to also take those tasks off your plate that you don't like because you're not gonna do them well and you're not gonna put the right energy into it, and then you're gonna have stuff that's undone or half done. I mean, I even still, like, struggle now. But I wish in the very beginning, I had interviewed a couple different virtual assistants and I kept thinking, oh, this is gonna cost so much money, and I don't know that I wanna spend my money on that because I wanna buy yarn. I wish I would have invested it in that because I think it would have really helped with some of my infrastructure early on.
Mark Sandeno:So moral of the story is put your yarn purchases on hold and invest in humans. Yes. Okay. So this is an experimental question. I'm gonna have you pitch your thing and tell us how we can find you and all that kind of stuff.
Mark Sandeno:Okay. If your business had a mascot, what would it be and why?
Heather Swan:Off the cuff, we do have a mascot. His name's Yulee. He is a little stuffed animal you. That's what I was thinking. I was like, I think I would still want it to be Yulee.
Heather Swan:Because he's super cute and he's personable. He has surrey fur for his fur on him, so it's super soft and silky. And everybody wants to just hold him and hug him. And I feel like a lot of times that's the feedback that we get about people when they come here and how they feel about this as their yarn home and stuff like that is that they know that they can be loved on and paid attention to when they need it. They know that they can come and share their expertise or they can find the experts to help them move along onto whatever projects they're working on.
Heather Swan:So it would still be Yulee.
Mark Sandeno:I wonder if we'll see Yulee featured more prominently in future Yarncom.
Heather Swan:I know. We need to. He does have a Facebook page. I just haven't done enough with it yet. So now I'm gonna have to.
Mark Sandeno:To end things off here, tell us where we can find you, what you want people checking out. Just totally promote your thing.
Heather Swan:Well, first, right before I promote, what I would like to say is, Mark, thank you for taking time to speak with me today. And anytime I get to have these conversations, it reminds me of why I'm doing what I'm doing, and it gets me really excited and jazzed up. And I do love your app and I love what you guys do to help my business be able to create experiences and be able to create ways for people to sign up for them. And I love how you guys just keep making it better and better, and it's a lot of fun to get to be a part of that.
Mark Sandeno:Well, shoot. Looks like we lost Heather. I'm gonna pitch her stuff for her. Her AirPods died, and she was right in the middle of telling us where we could find her. You can find her at yarn.comstl.com.
Mark Sandeno:That's yarncom stl.com. All sorts of classes. They have products. Get a really good sense of what's happening there. And then the other thing she talked about in the podcast was the Midwestfiberfest.com, which looks like a lot of fun.
Mark Sandeno:And I know you yarn folks, you fiber arts people are probably jotting this down right now. Yay. Another thing I can go to and meet my people. So Midwest Fiber Fest and yarncomstl.com. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today.
Mark Sandeno:It was wonderful having you on, Heather, and we look forward to seeing you all again on the next episode of The Experiences Podcast.