Small Business - A New Look for The Yarn Industry

Fresh faces, a culture clash, and the pandemic have turned the knitting world upside down

- Dimitra Kessenides

Adella Colvin was 34, recently married, and living in Georgia when she first visited a yarn shop on her own five years ago. One of her neighbors had suggested knitting as a hobby. Colvin figured she’d give it a try and headed to a shop in South Carolina, about 40 minutes from where she lived.

That experience could easily have become her last. Colvin barely made it past the front door when the owner, an older White woman, stepped in her way. “My bathroom is for customers only,” the proprietor declared.

“She saw a chubby Black woman with an afro knocking on her door,” Colvin says, and that was enough to end the interaction. “My heart shattered.” She turned around and left. Soon after, she decided to buy yarn online, for simple starter projects—hats and scarves. Then she decided to experiment with dyeing her own yarn.

When she wore her dyed wools, there’d always be compliments, women mostly who’d tell Colvin how much they liked the colors. So she opened an Etsy shop, Adella’s Crochet Cottage, in late 2015. “When I started selling,” she says, “I would not show my face. If people see a Black face, they think ‘inferior.”

When her daughter, Lola—nicknamed Bean—was born in June 2016, Colvin started to think about the legacy she was building. She rebranded her business LolaBean Yarn Co. and hired an illustrator to create an image of Bean, with big, bright eyes and unmistakably black skin, as her logo.