RIP TNNA

It brings me no pleasure at all to write this post, although I’m not that surprised to hear that The National NeedleArts Association, or “TNNA” as it was called, has thrown in the towel. Recent visitors to the website were met with a somewhat cryptic message stating that “as of April 30, 2020, TNNA will suspend operations until further notice.” The message cites the financial loss caused by the cancelled spring trade show, which apparently was the main source of TNNA’s income. The website does not come right out and say it, but I’m hard-pressed to imagine a way that the organization, already faltering in recent years, can continue. As of this writing, no word on whether companies who reserved booths and/or purchased badges will get refunds, although the tone of the website reads “highly unlikely.”

The past few years have been full of various losses to me and this is another one I feel keenly. I went to my first TNNA in 2006 and it was an absolutely magical experience. At that time, TNNA was a can’t-miss part of being in the knitting/yarn industry. Everyone in the business went and everyone had a blast. I pitched my first book proposal there. I met friends who are among the closest I’ve ever had. I networked and generated freelance work. I encountered my icons there. And I was inspired by the yarns, the clever displays, the beautiful garments and projects that were everywhere. Just sitting in the hotel common area, bouncing ideas around, telling war stories, soaking up what there was to love about the industry and its people. . .it’s tough to explain how compelling that was and how much it helped me develop as a writer and designer.

In recent years, however, TNNA shows began to change. They got smaller and smaller. Companies stopped paying for their personalities and designers and sales managers to go as attending became more expensive and industry profits were down. Instead of glorious displays that inspired, with garments and swatches and images, booths became smaller and plainer. Yarn stores started feeling a financial pinch and began alternating years or eliminating the trip altogether. Big sponsors stopped attending. One day, the show became an “is it worth it?” calculation instead of an “I wouldn’t miss it” event.

What happened?

Let me start by saying that my observations are simply that: my observations. I have friends who were part of the organization but this blog post is not based on any insider information. This post is also not meant to shit on anyone who is or was affiliated with TNNA.

Fundamental changes in our world presented significant challenges to the industry, and by extension, to TNNA. We’ve all heard the reasons why fewer people knit today: Clothes are cheaper and faster to make than to buy; women work outside the home and have less time for crafts; families are scattered, so that mom or grandmom isn’t always nearby to hand skills down to the younger generations.

Despite the cultural factors, the crafts industry is a big market that takes in a lot of money. So why couldn’t a trade association focused on a segment of that industry be successful?

The easy answer, one I’ve already heard bandied about, is the internet. There’s no denying the effect that the internet had on the knitting industry — although not all bad. In fact, for a while, in its early days, the internet helped to build up the knitting industry. For the first time, people began blogging about knitting, sharing intimate information about their lives and how knitting fit into their lives. Knitters connected with other knitters via chat rooms like the (dreaded) KnitList. We started to get a more global look at the craft, interacting with knitters from halfway across the world and being exposed to designs and materials and styles that were new to us. Knitters who didn’t have a local yarn shop could stay connected and purchase supplies delivered to their door. Even if you did have a great LYS, the internet was full of things that your LYS didn’t or couldn’t carry. Those were heady days for us knitting geeks.

As the internet grew, though, changes ran deeper and were more disruptive:

• E-commerce. The web created a global market where a knitter could sit on the couch and have a nearly unlimited selection of yarns delivered to her door in days. This made the LYS — mainstay attendee of TNNA — less relevant to shoppers. As business moved online LYSes saw profits drop. Less income for LYSes means less money to purchase inventory and less money to spend on travel for trade shows. The growth of online wholesaling taught LYSes that they too could see just about everything on offer from their living rooms, making trade shows a lower priority in cash-lean times.

• The growth of the indie sector. At first, only bigger LYSes had a web presence but over time, even a small farm or handdyer could have a decent website (or use a sales platform like Etsy) to sell product. Many of these smaller yarn producers didn’t have the money or presence to go to a trade show — or they saw no use in doing so, since producing an artisanal product on a mass scale is difficult. Certain small producers became hugely popular without ever selling a skein in a yarn shop. This growing “indie” market segment had no need of trade shows or middlemen; LYSes eager to sell these unique products understood that a yarn festival was more likely to introduce them to new indie vendors than the traditional trade show.

• Consumers became variety whores (if you’ll excuse the expression), always wanting something novel, whether a new base, a new combination of fibers, new handdyeing techniques, or just whatever was trendy. They wanted something new every time they came into the shop instead of relying on trusted brands or workhorse yarns purchased regularly. TNNA shows were based on a model where wholesalers presented their offerings at a show; yarn shops came and ordered a season’s worth (or a year’s worth) of yarn; and that was it until the next season or year. The traditional model of wholesaling no longer made sense with a customer base thirsting for novelty at every visit. Gone are the days when most shops carry every color of a line of yarn or maintain decent levels of inventory in a single yarn that lasts season after season.

• At the same time, LYSes became cash crunched. As knitters spent their dollars elsewhere, it became less realistic to order a large amount of yarn and pay for it on the spot (or even in 30 or 60 days). If you wanted to buy something and hold it back for later months, you were paying interest on it the whole time. (Even worse, by the time you rolled out one of these yarns later in the season, consumers had already seen it online.) Some smart wholesalers tried to respond to this: in later years, companies offered to ship multiple times a season, or to space out deliveries. (Classic Elite really tried to change its way of wholesaling to take advantage of this, offering a new yarn for sale each month or so, including pattern support.) But that made everyone’s cash flow tighter, which had a ripple effect throughout the industry. Manufacturers could no longer count on a big infusion of cash in June to finance big yarn orders (the larger the order, the less the per-skein cost); the income was spread out over a season.

• The keystone model of wholesaling (where retailers offer a product at double the wholesale price) became obsolete. Online outlets were able to sell at lower-than-keystone because their costs were much lower than a bricks and mortar store. Customers quickly became used to these lower prices. TNNA once functioned as a go-between for wholesalers and retail outlets, with enough profit margin for both to make money. Once companies began bypassing that model and selling direct to consumers, the raison d’etre for the trade show was gone. It’s also worth mentioning that the keystone model was impossible to use with indie producers, especially dyers. The amount of time and hand labor put into indie products requires a more nuanced pricing mechanism, one that is likely to differ from artisan to artisan. The booming popularity of handpaints and small-batch yarn just didn’t match up with the trade show, reliant as it was on the keystone model.

• Social media played a role (of course). Trends that took a while to get started and played out over months were condensed to weeks with the speed of the internet, bypassing a trade show’s ability to make use of them to sell product. The ability to “network” online instead of in-person, with improved message boards and Ravelry, eliminated another key reason to come to the show.

• Lower barriers to entry into the professional market. In the past, the only way to buy yarn at wholesale was to find a yarn supplier and prove you were a business (i.e., by providing a business license). You used to have to work with a traditional publisher to produce a book. You used to have to work with a specific yarn company to maximize pattern sales, because the yarn company would market the pattern as a means of selling the yarn. To do so, you needed to meet up with those folks at a trade show. Over time, though, a lot of that networking and business building took place on line. While that’s been a wonderful development in some ways, it’s not a great thing for a trade show that relies on traditional, i.e. in person, models of doing business.

Faced with that kind of change, what’s a trade organization to do?

Mistakes Were Made

It may well be that this much market disruption was simply too great a challenge no matter what TNNA did. Yet business-to-business trade shows constitute a $14 to $16 billion dollar annual industry, according to one study. Obviously some trade groups are adapting and continuing to find value in trade shows. Knitting is a highly tactile and visual industry, too, more so than many other industries. So what could TNNA have done differently?

Here are some thoughts:

1. TNNA needed to change its M.O. from that of a volunteer hobby organization to that of a business. The goal of the organization had to expand beyond simply putting on two shows per year for its members. That meant finding other ways to provide something of value to its members so it could continue to attract and keep members AND to finance its operations. The Covid-19 pandemic was an extraordinary circumstance, but TNNA still had all its financial eggs in one basket and that’s a bad model for a business.

A related problem was TNNA’s heavy reliance on volunteer help from its members. First of all, expecting people with their own challenging businesses to also give plenty of time and thought to running a trade organization is a big ask. For a long time, there was also a “pay to play” aspect to volunteering. Until recently (2018ish?) only wholesale members could vote and hold executive positions. To join one of the subgroups that had some input into the organization, you had to pay an extra fee. As a result, bigger businesses and older men tended to dominate TNNA leadership. Every business benefits from a variety of viewpoints and backgrounds. But TNNA’s leadership tended to exclude a critical goup of stakeholders who had smaller and/or newer businesses. Maybe newer voices and voices from different segments of the industry could have helped the organization adapt sooner to industry changes.

2. Evaluate the alliance with the needlepoint/cross-stitch/embroidery industry. Nothing against needlepoint, cross-stitch, and embroidery (I love all three), but I sensed that the goals of what I’ll call the “stitching” sector were less and less congruent with the goals of the yarn industry. Advantages? Smaller shows that could be held at less expensive venues. A nimbler response to trends, maybe multiple smaller shows in a year. The ability to hold the show when it was most advantageous to yarn shop owners.

3. Undervaluing membership for years, then tripling dues in a single year. Yearly dues for a professional trade organization at $60 year after year? Then in one fell swoop tripling them? Bad move. Imposing a huge dues increase right when your organization is at its least attractive to members is the kiss of death. Membership dues should have increased more gradually over a period of years, starting earlier.

4. Failure to change when the traditional business model became obsolete. TNNA had to seriously grapple with the fact that its annual show was declining given the new reality of the industry. It had to make fundamental changes in the way it presented shows, when it presented shows (because most LYSes have ordered some or all of their fall product in the spring, and don’t want to wait until June for the show), where and how it put on shows. In fairness, TNNA did start to freshen up their offerings in later years. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, shows just how dangerous it can be to depend on one annual event as your primary source of income.

5. Failure to reach out to new kinds of LYS owners and yarn companies. It’s going to be hard for me to write this section without spouting stereotypes, for which I humbly apologize. I have long observed a distinction between different types of LYS owners. There are, quite plainly hobbyists (who do not depend on their shop to provide them with income to live on or who are wealthy enough to use a yarn shop as a plaything) and there are businesspeople (who treat their LYS very seriously as a business and rely on that income as their primary wage). TNNA couldn’t (or wouldn’t) commit to the serious businessperson. The website wasn’t useful (how many years did they send out paper directories?) and had little compelling content. Classes offered were focused more on extremely basic skills, like how to create a newsletter, than about advanced skills that would appeal to the more experienced businessperson.

I can’t emphasize this enough. There has been a perception that groups like TNNA are only going to be effective with regard to brand-new proprietors who need the basics. This ends up helping a handful of new business owners whilst ignoring the larger population of established business owners. If TNNA could have better built up its educational offerings and come up with other services to provide to shop owners, its membership would have been seen as a worthwhile investment rather than as a ticket to one show a year, broadening its appeal. It would have justified dues increases. It also would have helped when an unforeseen circumstance like Covid-19 caused the big show to be cancelled.

6. Keeping the show in Columbus year after year. The idea was that Columbus is central to the US (sort of) and it’s big enough but not too big to scare people afraid of big cities. Moving the show around would have enabled different LYS owners and professionals to attend by making it a driveable (and therefore cheaper) trip. Mid-sized and smaller vendors might be willing to attend a show where they could drive their booth furnishings instead of shipping them. And a different venue, rather than the same-old, might have been an extra draw for people ambivalent about going. (“I’ve been to Columbus six times, but I’ve never gone to NEW CITY.”)

Overall, it seemed there was a steep cultural resistance to change running through TNNA and it cost the group dearly. When expressing concern about the huge increase in dues relative to what one gets from membership, the refrain “You get out of it what you put in” was constantly bandied about. When your members are telling you that your organization is not worth the price of admission, maybe asking “why?” would have been a more useful approach.

Doing a post-mortem on TNNA makes me sad. Our industry is becoming more and more splintered and the TNNA show at one time was a way for the industry to get together. Now knitters exist in their own bubbles. Think about vintage television. It sucked that there were only four channels to watch, but the flip side was that it provided a common background for people. Everyone watched the same thing and that unified them culturally. That commonality and unity no longer comes from the shared experience of a trade show. We need to get it back somehow.

Now that I have told all you kids to get off my lawn,

via GIPHY

I will sit back and remember fondly all the wonderful times I had at various TNNA shows. I will think upon the incredible friends I met there who still are an important and beautiful part of my life. I will remember the time we visited the adjacent Haunted House Organization trade show when ghouls were floating all over the lobby and I’ll remember the time we watched the prom kids go by and applauded them from the bar. I’ll remember seeing the clog dancers with towering wigs at lunchtime and I’ll remember the first time I met my heroes of knitting. I’ll remember when Rowan had multiple booths with tons of samples and gorgeous displays and when Ysolda Teague would bring an entire tea shop to the show. I’ll miss that little cafe down the street where we used to meet for breakfast. I’ll remember the days when TNNA drank the hotel out of wine and I’ll remember the “kid in a candy store” feeling of stepping into that giant ballroom full of yarn. Most of all, I’ll mis that wonderful sense of being part of a world that I love and the glorious feeling that knitting couldn’t die when all these people loved it as deeply as me.

Thanks for the memories.