WELCOME TO THE SPINCYCLE YARNS FAMILY!
We are delighted to have you! As you may know firsthand, we have a very long waitlist for shops interested in carrying Spincycle, so we appreciate the patience you have shown.
We are committed to growing our brand carefully and strategically, and only adding new stockists that we feel are a good fit. The waitlist for becoming a Spincycle Yarns stockist is over 150 shops deep as of spring 2023. Since you’re now part of the family, we can let you in on a little secret: We don’t manage the queue on a first come, first served basis.
We spend time looking at your website, the other brands you carry, your social media presence, and your reputation for kindness and inclusivity. We also consult the map, to fill in areas where we do not have many stockists, but ultimately our decision is based on your values and aesthetics.
We are a small(ish) yarn mill and dye house in Bellingham, Washington. We have a hardworking staff of nearly 30 folks, and we make all of our yarn lines under one roof. We’re guessing that you knew a little about us when you reached out, but for more of our story, visit Spincycle Yarns home page and scroll down. While you are on our site, please check out Who We Are to read about our values and benefits we provide to our employees. Customers sometimes want to know why our price point is high, and on that page we get into the nitty gritty about what their yarn dollars are supporting.
Now, a deep dive into the fine print:
OPENING ORDER MINIMUM: $3000
This amount is not negotiable, as we want to be sure your first order makes an impact on your shelves.
ANNUAL MINIMUM: $10,000 IN WHOLESALE PURCHASES
We ask that our stockists aim for an annual minimum because we want you to have good inventory numbers and good options when knitters come searching for our yarns! An important element of the brand we have built is the uniqueness of each and every skein. Over the two decades that we have been dyeing and spinning yarn, we have watched people connect personally with a colorway or even an individual skein of yarn! Knitters want to see lots of skeins in stock so that they can enjoy the “hunt” for the perfect skein. This is our absolute favorite thing about folks getting to choose their Spincycle in a brick & mortar yarn shop. Expect knitters to make themselves at home in your shop while they spread out an entire colorway to find their perfect skein!
We prioritize collaborations with designers and other small yarn companies; as a result, there are new patterns featuring Spincycle Yarns being released constantly, making it pretty easy to hit that annual target. If you need ideas about pattern support, please follow us on Instagram @spincycle_yarns and subscribe to our newsletter! We work really hard to try to make sure no new patterns slip past us, so there is never any shortage of ideas for your customers.
WHOLESALE PORTAL
All of your wholesale purchasing will be done through our Wholesale Portal, found under the “Wholesale” drop-down menu on the navigation bar of our website.
To access the Wholesale Portal, first you must create an account on our website, located in the upper right hand corner of the website, and then email info@spincycleyarns.com and let us know that your account is active. We have to attach a “key” to your account before you will be able to access the Portal, and we will not know to look for you unless you email!
When you set up your account, please enter the email that will be used for receiving and paying invoices. You can ask us to use a different email for your stockist newsletter and other correspondence, but it is very important that the website account email goes to whomever is in charge of paying invoices.
Also, double check that shipping address! Make sure it is the one you want your boxes of Spincycle sent to! You can always change it, but please keep it up to date.
If you are not able to view the drop down items, you are either not logged in properly, or orders are closed for the current cycle. If you think something is amiss, please email info@spincycleyarns.com
PURCHASE ORDERS AND INVOICES
Yarns are sold by the line and colorway, in bags of 5 to 8 skeins, depending on the line. You can add as many bags as you like to your cart. The price is listed in the product title, and you’ll see MSRP in the item description. There is no cost to you at check out, as this “order” just creates a purchase order on our end. You will be billed when your yarn is ready to ship, and we ship as soon as the payment has cleared.
Invoices for wholesale orders must be paid within 5 business days. If we don’t receive payment and we have to cancel all or part of your order, we may charge you a 20% restocking fee before we can move forward with a future order. Multiple order cancellations and/or shipment refusals will result in the termination of your wholesale account.
TIMED ORDERING SYSTEM
We open our online wholesale portal 3 to 4 times per year, for one week at a time. We will email you before and during the open period, so please check your email.
Once orders are in, the cycle of production and fulfillment begins! Turnaround time is based on the cumulative size of the orders taken in during the opening. Let us explain in detail…
The reason for collecting all stockists’ orders at once is so that we can compile the orders and calculate the weight of wool we need to dye to produce the right number of skeins in each colorway. Once we collect the numbers, we then create a spreadsheet listing the colorways by weight, which our dyers reference when they begin dyeing a new batch. That way, we can mill a complete colorway for everyone at once.
Again, just for clarity: We dye the entirety of a single yarn line and colorway at one time, to cover all wholesale orders. Because we have to clean the machines thoroughly in between each colorway, running huge batches means less downtime and better efficiency! In this way, we are unlike some indie dyers you may work with, who can pull up your shop’s order, fire up the dye pots, and blast through the entire order at once. That sounds amazing, but the process of dyeing un-dyed skeins, which is what most indie dyers do, is very different from dyeing wool and then milling the yarn.
Also because of our unique system, our turnaround time is based on total quantities ordered by all stockists. We know that means that some shops’ smallish orders can be slowed down by other shops’ very large orders, but we can’t do much about that, unfortunately. Remember, smaller batches mean more downtime in the mill, as machines are cleaned and settings adjusted!
On average, we completely fulfill everyone's orders within 3-4 months. When we reach a point in the cycle where we see that we are near to closing out all orders, we will send an email letting you know that we will soon be reopening the wholesale portal for the next cycle. And on and on we go!
READY TO SHIP (RTS)
We are experimenting with a new section in our online shop for stockists, the Ready To Ship (RTS) section!
We know that sometimes you can feel a lag in shipments. That might be because of routine machine maintenance on our end, or it could be that we are running some colorways that you didn’t order, so there is nothing for us to fulfill for you. We want your Spincycle shelves to always feel lush, so we are going to try to keep some of our most popular yarns and colorways in stock and ready to ship. We will also toss in colorways to be used in upcoming pattern releases, as well as the occasional colorway that we overproduced.
Please check this section any time, even when Wholesale ordering is closed! We will be adding things in as frequently as we can, and we will ship them (as well as anything else in your open order that has come through) immediately.
This is new for us, so let us know how you like the RTS section by emailing Maya at info@spincycleyarns.com !
COMPLETE VS. PARTIAL SHIPMENTS
We can either send out partial shipments from your open order every few weeks until fulfilled, or we can hold the entire order until it is all ready to ship.
Our wholesale liaison, Maya, will be your point person for discussing shipping options. We know that some shops prefer to have us hold shipment until the order is complete, while others want anything and everything as soon as we have complete colorway runs! We have created a very handy google form for keeping track of your preferences. Find that here: https://forms.gle/c7sYBh5gurGKXYDN8
If you are wondering where your order stands in terms of completion, or what colorways and lines the mill is working on currently, please reach out! Maya is available five days a week to check in and keep you updated. Reach her at: info@spincycleyarns.com
ACCOUNT ACTIVITY
We ask that stockists place an order at least once per year to keep the account active.
You are welcome to make one big annual order, or you may order every time we open the wholesale portal, but if your account goes quiet for over one year, we may opt to close it to make room for a new shop. If we close your account, you can request that we place you on the waitlist again. However, we do not give special preference to previous stockists, and as some of you already know, that queue moves slowly.
SPECIAL PATTERN RELEASES AND NEW YARNS/COLORWAYS
We sometimes open the Wholesale Portal in the middle of our production cycle for upcoming pattern releases or when we launch a new product.
If we are launching something new, or if we have enough advance notice from a designer who is about to drop a new pattern and we have space in our production schedule to squeeze in extra batches of their pattern’s colorways, we will send an email to let y’all know that we’ve opened up the Wholesale Portal. Usually, in this case, we will only allow purchase orders to be made for specific products. For example, last year’s Trinigan sweater from Andrea Mowry was just such an occasion.
SHOP EVENTS AND LEAD TIME
Many of you participate in yarn crawls, host your own retreats, or vend at knitting events. If you know that you have one of these on the calendar and you are hoping to have a bountiful offering of Spincycle at your event, please let us know as soon as you have committed. Seriously, we cannot stress this enough. It is never too soon to communicate with us about a special event. For special events, we will ask that you place a separate order from your regular wholesale order, so that we can flag it and focus on your dates. The absolute minimum lead time we will need to get you all or most of your order is three months. This does not include shipping time. With four to six months advance notice, we can guarantee you’ll be swimming in Spincycle!
SHOP EXCLUSIVE COLORWAYS
We love working with you on a shop exclusive colorway! There is a bit of a waitlist for exclusives, since it takes time to develop a new colorway. Here is a very handy google form that Anna has put together, and which you must fill out completely to be considered for a custom colorway: https://forms.gle/w8rxpVBeFrNTNFLq9
Please be as thorough as possible, and include a photo or photos that accurately represent the colors that you want to see in your colorway. You will have to commit to purchasing the entire lot of your exclusive, which we dye in batches of 12-15 pounds minimum. More details are in the google doc if you are interested!
Thank you so much for reading all of this so that you can understand our process from front to back. We look forward to collaborating with you and your LYS. It is an absolute honor that you have created a space for our yarns in your thoughtfully curated shop. Please reach out any time. We are happy to walk you through using the Wholesale Portal, to help strategize your first order, or answer any questions!
Cheers! -Rachel, Kate, Maya, and the whole Spincycle crew