Dear KnitCrate Community,

The past couple years have been everything but easy. Every time we expected there to be a little sunshine breaking through the clouds, it felt like something else would come up and throw everything sideways. It is not lost on us how much this has impacted the customer experience, and we have been working diligently as a team to set the foundation for better days to come. I don’t want to use this email to rehash the delays and all that went wrong. You are more than familiar with these as you weathered them with us. What I would like to do is give you a look at what we are doing and have done to correct the things we can control and better alleviate those we cannot.

First and foremost, I want to say thank you to you, our customers. Your patience and constructive feedback throughout have been what have made it possible for us to keep going in the face of these challenges. Taking your feedback and implementing it to make your kits and online community better is what has and will keep us going.

Secondly, I want to publicly acknowledge our team. A company isn’t an amorphous abstract concept without a soul. There are actual, real people here who care, and have been working to make things right for our customers. It is our team that makes things happen and is on the front lines when something does not go right. It is our team who is to credit when things do go right, particularly with the obstacles that we’ve encountered. So thank you to each and every one of you. There is a saying that goes something like, “a true friend doubles your joy and divides your grief.” I think this can be said about our team at KnitCrate, and I know that I could not have made it through this time without all of you. You have been working every day when the days have been long and difficult to make KnitCrate better for our customers and community. We are a stronger company because of your dedication.  

While the entire team has gone above and beyond to “right the ship,” I would like to give a singular shout out to Aimée Hansen. For those in our community who have interacted with her, I think you would agree that you can’t find a bigger customer advocate than Aimée. From helping manage our online communities to working with our designers and mills, Aimée really fights for what she feels is in the customers’ best interest and what can make our products and experience even better. She isn’t afraid to voice her opinion and often comes to me directly with your feedback to see how and when we can incorporate it. For this, and all that she does, I am very grateful.

Now, I would like to take a few minutes to detail some of the steps we have been taking to better the KnitCrate service and product.

Customer Service Delays

We had been experiencing some serious delays in answering customer service emails in a timely manner. This was due to the volume of messages received about delays. Most were due to mill and inventory delays, which then led to shipping delays to you. The number one complaint we received in customer service over the past months was shipping related, especially for our international members. It led to an influx of emails which resulted in 2,000+ emails being in queue at any given time, and put us over 30 days behind in responding. To make matters worse, we couldn’t onboard and train new members fast enough to keep up with the avalanche of emails that came in. I am happy to say that this has been remedied and we are now at a normal level of daily emails and adequately staffed to handle them accordingly. 

Here are some of the changes we made that have helped resolve this:

• We addressed the root cause of most of the emails: shipping and fulfillment. We’ve outsourced our warehouse and fulfillment to a third party (Shipmonk), who is much better equipped to handle the volume of orders we regularly process. We’re in the second month of working with this new setup and while we’ve encountered a few speed bumps during the full transition, Shipmonk has been a fantastic partner in helping get orders out in a much timelier fashion.
• Outsourcing  fulfillment has allowed us to reallocate our team from packing boxes to answering customer service emails and fulfilling other necessary functions. This move, along with adding a couple new customer service reps, has put us back in a position where most emails are being answered within a day or two (except for weekends).
• Our mill has also been working diligently to get our yarn deliveries out faster and earlier each month. For November, it appears that we will be receiving the yarn between the 15th and the 19th, which would allow us to ship kits much sooner than in recent months. The December yarns will be ready in about two weeks’ time, and we are very excited to see these time frames moving in the right direction.

Product and Member Experience Improvements from now through 2022

There are some key improvements coming to our kits and your customer experience with KnitCrate.

• The Teal KnitCrate Boxes: All subscriptions are going back to our widely recognized Teal Boxes, unless that shipment is too large or heavy to ship in the box (or there is a delay in teal boxes arriving to our fulfillment center from our manufacturer). We really wanted to make a move toward the compostable mailers, but they proved to have some major quality issues (sometimes ripping open in transit and losing our customers’ products).
• The Yarn: We hear you. Less alpaca, please, and more variety in colorways and dye techniques. Check and check. We are excited for you to see what’s coming in 2022.
• Member Central: We have been listening to feedback from members with Active Subscriptions receiving their monthly kits and the discounts associated with them. Their complaint can be paraphrased as such: “It is unfair that other members get to skip month after month and still have the perks of Member Central and Double Down discounts.” While we feel that most members use the skip feature for its intended purpose, we understand how seeing others frequently skip and still receiving the same member benefits may leave others feeling less value in receiving their crates. Our team did some research about this, and the options within our system limited what could be done other than removing the Skip feature, which we didn’t feel was right. Rather than do away with the Skip feature and penalize members who have been loyal members over the years, we are going to be changing the discounts some along with the way perks and discounts are distributed starting January 1, 2022.
• The Member Central Discount is going to be changing from 50% to 30%. As it is today, the Member Central discount will remain for all members with active subscriptions, even if a month is skipped. This way, if a member has to skip a month, they still have some benefit in the terms of a discount they can use in the shop.
• Double Down discounts (ranging from an additional 25-50% or more) will be exclusive to those members who receive a kit during the current month. Double Down discounts will only be included in the digital and print versions of the magazines that come with the crates. These discount codes will also be different each month, so make sure to check your digital or print magazines for the month’s discount. The Double Down discount has always been meant to be a perk for our members receiving their crates, so they can “double down” on more of the month’s yarn. We will continue to have occasional member-wide sales that we will announce by email. We hope this is a happy medium for everyone.
• Customer Portal and Backend: We made some significant improvements to the customer portal. It should be much more intuitive and user friendly. Skipping, Canceling, Adding and Reactivating subscriptions should be a much simpler process. If you have not already done so, I encourage you to login into your account and check it out.
• Future Pattern Library: We have been testing out our new library feature, and we are hoping that, with the New Year, your patterns can consistently be found here on the first of each month to go along with each of your monthly kits or when you buy a pattern on the shop. Our download pages will still be available for adding the month’s patterns to your Ravelry library.

Theme for 2022 – “Let’s Hit the Reset Button”

Finally, I want to end by letting you know what our company theme is for 2022. The past two years have rocked the world in a very hard way. Things have not been easy for many - personally, professionally, and emotionally. With that said, our company theme is going to be “Let’s Hit the Reset Button.” Let’s get back to basics. Let’s get back to serving our customers the best way we can as we rebound from this time. Let’s get back to enjoying the work we do, enjoy the company of the people we do it with, and make beautiful projects together.

I hope that you will allow KnitCrate be a part of your journey in 2022. But even if you don’t, we understand.  We hope in time that we can earn back your trust. As we “hit the reset button” on this stressful time for us as a business, I hope that each of you will also be able to do so with the stressors that have entered your world during these months. Sometimes that reset button can be something as simple as taking a few minutes out of your day, winding a skein of yarn, and breathing through the stitches of a new project.

Thank you for your time and reading through all of this. Most importantly, thank you for being a part of KnitCrate’s journey, past, present, and future.

All the best,

Rob and the team at KnitCrate