Woman Embroidering by August Macke
Here’s a portrait of the average needlepointer:
- You make about 13 projects per year
- About 1/3 of your projects use materials from your stash
- You spend between $600 and $800 on materials for all your projects, about 30% more than cross stitchers and knitters, and about twice ass much as crocheters
- You spend about $100 less on needlepoint than you did three years ago
- You spend about $500 on classes and education
- The projects your prefer to make are pillows, Christmas items, ornaments or stockings (listed in order of popularity
- 2/3 of your purchases come from specialty needlework stores (on-line and off)
- 30% of your spending is for threads and another 30% for canvas (I assume this includes painted canvases)
- Needlepointers spend a slightly higher percentage of their purchases on finishing than cross stitchers and significantly more than knitters (who don’t spend money here and crocheters, who spend little
- Only about 5% of your spending is on book and magazines
There is also a wholesale portion of the survey and it has some good news for us as stitchers. The revenue for needlepoint sales has grown, unlike knitting shops. The number of shops has stayed the same, and almost 80% of them have a website of some kind. About 40% of stores have both a physical and an Internet store.
If you like trunk shows and classes, retailers found them the most effective way to bring people into shops, so there should be more of them in the future. Needlepoint retailers want more new and fresh canvases to sell, so let’s hope that brings more innovation.
On the designer/manufacturer side, the market is profitable, with needlepoint the second biggest segment of the market, after knitting. What does that mean to you as a stitcher? A profitable wholesale market means that people with fresh new ideas will look at and enter this market, meaning more cool things for us to stitch.
These results are from The State of Specialty NeedleArts 2010, a survey done by TNNA (a trade organization) earlier this year and just released. Many of you took part in this survey through promotions of it here and elsewhere. Your answers greatly help those in the needlework industry create products and services that meet your needs.
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I answered all of these in great detail, and it got eaten. Phooey.
Interesting results. 30% for threads seems low, but maybe that’s just me. Otherwise I’m pretty average.