Etsy Seller Interview with Nicole and Cordula of DyeForYarn

How DyeForYarn got started

Introduce your Etsy shop and tell us your story. How did you begin and decide on what to sell on Etsy, and how do you create your products?

Hi, we’re Nicole and Cordula from DyeForYarn! We hand dye small lots of luxury fiber yarns, like Mulberry and Tussah silk, cashmere, alpaca, and yak. We specialize in mostly solid colorways on light-weight yarns like lace and fingering weight. Our yarns are suitable for elegant lace shawls, but also for lightweight cardigans and sweaters, and for lovely hats and mittens.

We started dyeing yarn back in 2010, when we were knitting in our free time next to our day job in biology research at the university. We weren’t able to find either the quality nor the colors we wanted for our lace projects here in Germany, so without further ado, we decided to dye the yarn ourselves. With our lab experience, we went at the dyeing process as scientists would. with lots of small samples in Falcon test tubes and dyes weighed on the milligram scale on an analytical balance.

We quickly accumulated lots of hand-dyed skeins and decided to sell a few of them on Etsy. It was easy to find names for all the colors we had dyed so far. We went with our black humor and chose synonyms for dying, honoring John Cleese in Monty Python’s famous sketch "The dead parrot." We carry colors such as "Ghost knocking on heaven’s door," "Kingfisher pushing up the daisies," or "Violet coming to dust." Our company name, DyeForYarn, followed suit. In 2011, we were able to quit our day jobs and open a yarn store in Fürth, near Nuremberg. However, our primary focus has remained and continues to be online sales. 

Favorite items

What are your favorite items? What makes these so special? Why do you think these items might be selling well?

We started with dyeing a single-ply Tussah silk lace yarn back in 2010, and that yarn is still our favorite. It’s very popular with our customers, too, and has been featured in lots of designs by knitting designers around the globe.

We do have favorite colors, of course, but dyeing yarn taught us to value all colors and shades. A solid to very softly variegated yarn has a simple beauty that reveals itself when you look closely. Nevertheless, our personal favorites are "Nocturnal Maelstrom" (Cordula’s favorite) and "Eternal Sleep" (Nicole’s favorite).

Getting sales on Etsy

How long did it take for you to earn your first sale and how do you currently attract customers to your Etsy shop?

We opened our DyeForYarn shop on Etsy in February 2010 and sold our first skein of yarn in April of that year. However, it wasn't until August that we were discovered by a group of US yarn enthusiasts on the platform ravelry.They spread the word about a new German indie dyer selling fabulous luxury silk lace yarns. We added a second shop called DyeForWool to carry all our wooly blends later that year. Right now, we use Ravely’s advertisement system and also advertise a little on Etsy. But our worldwide customer base is huge, so word travels that our yarns are of the highest quality and our customer service is excellent.

Managing DyeForYarn

How do you manage your shop? Are you running solo or do you have any team members? What tools or services do you use to run your shop and how do you handle fulfillment?

Cordula and I run both shops with all that’s involved. from ordering the raw materials, printer paper, and envelopes, to dyeing, taking and adjusting pictures, shipping the yarn, and, of course, customer service. We had a part-time employee for the past 7 years who helped us wash the skeins after the dyeing process, wind them into hanks, and label them with hang tags. But currently, it’s just the two of us again.

We manage our shops in the browser; we don’t use an app for them. We use an image processing program to adjust our yarn pictures and try to be as accurate as possible with both the pictures themselves and the color description. We take that very seriously because our customers go out on a limb by buying yarn online. Different monitors can display colors very differently, so the description is as vital as the pictures. We manage our shipping through the Sendcloud platform and generate our invoices through a self-programmed tool. 

The future of DyeForYarn

What goals do you have for your shop in the future?

We’re always on the lookout for exciting new yarn qualities. The process of testing a new yarn base is vigorous because it has to convince us as dyers, but more importantly, it has to convince us as knitters. We only sell yarns that we ourselves want to work with. We’re very glad that our shops manage to pay our bills, and we’d like to keep it that way.

Advice for new sellers

What’s your advice for a new seller starting an Etsy shop?

That’s quite difficult to answer because Etsy has changed so much over the last 12 years. When we started back in 2010, Etsy was much smaller, and it was easier to get a foot in the door.

But we think there are some general rules one should follow no matter where one sells.

1. Get yourself a good bookkeeper.
2. Have excellent customer service.
3. Have the highest quality products that you yourself would want to use.
4. Invest in a good camera.
5. Take your time adjusting the pictures you take.
6. Describe your items as accurately as possible.
7. Always ship on time (and, when that’s not possible due to illness, be transparent about it).