Spincycle Yarns Designer Support Program

Thank you for your interest in Spincycle Yarns. We are so happy that our yarns inspire your creativity. If you’d like to know more about Spincycle as a company, visit Our Story.

Spincycle Yarns offers yarn support as well as collaborative promotion for qualifying design ideas! We love working with new designers as well as our recurring collaborators. There isn’t a pattern too small or too big for designer support and cross promotion. Before we send you yarn, we want to make sure we are setting each other up for mutual success! Spend a moment on the questions below.

Have we worked together before? Even if so, we've changed a few things about what we need in order to offer yarn support, so please give this another read-through before you send your yarn wishlist. If we haven't yet worked together, we’d like to get to know you! Please share your design portfolio in the form of your Ravelry designer page, IG profile, and/or website.

What type of design are you proposing? Send a sketch and/or a detailed written description of your pattern idea.

Which of our yarns and colors are you working with? We occasionally discontinue a line or colorway to make room for new ideas. If your yarn support includes something that is marked for discontinuation, we’ll let you know and point you in an alternate direction.

Are there other yarns besides Spincycle in the pattern? We love our fellow yarn makers and enjoy a good multiplayer collaboration! Working with two yarn companies often means that we have different requirements for lead time or cross promotion, so let’s get that three-way dialogue going asap.

Is your design size inclusive? We're only interested in working with designers who are size inclusive in their pattern grading. This means that garments include sizing up to 60" in bust circumference, not including ease. For instance, if you recommend 5” of positive ease, your largest finished size would be 65". If you have questions about why size inclusive pattern grading is important, we can direct you to some great resources.

Will your pattern be tech edited and test knit? Hint: YES is the answer! We also hope that your pattern testers will be excited to test in Spincycle, so we will send you a discount code that you can share with your test group.

When do you plan to release your pattern? It is very helpful to our production and marketing teams to know the approximate release date from the outset. We know this can change based on testing, tech editing, and photography, but it is very important for us to have a target date. Why? We often have many designer collabs in process at once, and we have to manage the production needs of our 70+ stockists as well. Knowing your target release date a few months ahead of time lets us insure that we have your colorway(s) in stock. (Keep scrolling to the very bottom to see an ideal timeline, from the perspective of a yarn mill.)

Are you planning to take high quality photos of your design? We cannot overstate the importance of this. You designers work so hard on your patterns and put so much thought into unique shapes, color combinations, size grading, running test groups, editing, formatting… Please don’t lose momentum before it is time to do the photo shoot!!!

We want to be able to cross promote your pattern in our weekly newsletter and on Instagram. For this reason, having a really good set of photos is non-negotiable. Since most patterns are not available to peruse until they’ve been purchased, the quality of your photoshoot is how you send the message that your design is also quality. No matter how good the design is, if the photos are not good, we cannot promote or share them in our newsletter or on IG.

In order to be able to cross promote your design on our social media and in our newsletter, you must send us a set of professional and/or high quality photos* one to two weeks before the release date.

* These days, taking great photos doesn’t necessarily require a fancy camera. Most smart phones take excellent pics. It’s all about lighting and composition! If you're new to pattern photography and not sure how to get started, here are some tips on how to create a beautiful photo set: this one is about basic photo composition and this one gets into some tips on portraiture.

A set of professional photos checks all of the following boxes:

High resolution (72dpi and long edge must be at least 1080p);
Well lit (natural or studio lighting);
Includes at least three different angles: back, front, and flat lay are good places to start;
Includes modeled shots, aka on a human (bonus points if that human is you, the designer);
Includes both tight, cropped closeups as well as pics that show the whole design;
Free of background clutter or other distractions;
Not overly reliant on filters;
Free of text overlay.

Thank you for taking time to read through what we ask of designers to whom we send yarn support. As you might have guessed, our production and marketing teams here are quite busy, which is why failure to meet the requirements listed above may result in us having to withdraw pattern support/promotion. That said, we’ve been doing this for many years now, so if you are new to design and have questions or need clarification on any point, please don’t hesitate to ask!

When you are ready to design, reach out to designersupport@spincycleyarns.com with your contact and shipping info and a list of what you need in the way of yarn support, and we will get this ball rolling! Please include yarn line, colorway(s) and yardage needs. We can’t wait to support your creativity with a care package of our yarn!

Yours,

Kate, Rachel, and the Spincycle team

Timeline for yarn support and pattern cross promotion:

This is what an ideal timeline looks like for us. This is not a comprehensive list of all the things a designer will need to do; this is strictly from the perspectives of our yarn mill and marketing team!

2-6 months before target release date: Send us an email with your proposal and yarn wish list. We can discuss yarn availability, possible discontinuations, space on our production calendar, etc., and we will still have ample time to ship yarn to you.

2-3 months before target release date: Finalize your colorway selection. Remember, we are not just hand dyers! We are a wool mill, and our yarn production begins in the dye house and then moves into the mill to be pin drafted, spun, plied, washed, twisted and tagged. We need plenty of lead time in order to have good inventory numbers for the yarns used in your pattern!

Put out a testing call and tag us so that we can share it. We’ll send you a discount code to share with your test group to encourage them to use Spincycle. Please be thoughtful of your testers making the larger sizes. If they need more time, give it!

1-2 months before target release date: Send us a draft copy, even if it is still in testing. We may decide to have our own sample made, and/or some of our staff here may make their own, which is always excellent for pattern promotion!

1 month before target release date: Finalize your pattern release date. If we have other releases that conflict with the date, we can try to move some things around.

2 weeks before release: Send us your final set of edited pattern photos. If you like dropping teaser photos, let us know when your earliest teaser photos may be shown, and tag us in anything you post to IG or TikTok.

1 week before release: Set up your pattern page on Ravelry or a “coming soon” page on your pattern website. Even without the final pdf pattern upload, we need a link to be able to draft our weekly newsletter. We cannot include your pattern in our newsletter unless we have a Ravelry or website link. Our newsletter goes out on Thursdays. We need your link no later than the Monday before your pattern drops.

The night before: Check your Instagram link in bio to make sure that folks can click through your IG to the pattern page. Schedule your newsletter, if you send one. Load up your Ravelry pattern page with your own professional photo set, and also lots of photos from your testers!

The day of: We have the expectation that you will make shareable posts to your social media, so promote, promote, promote! No one really knows how to slay the IG algorithm, but the more you post, the more folks will see your pattern. Choose a few of the best photos to post to your grid, but don’t forget your IG stories. Stories are great because they don’t have to be as perfect or polished as the grid photos, and you can add lots of tags and gifs to catch people’s eyes. Re-story your testers’ photos.

And please don’t forget to tag us! If you have met our requirements for marketing, our newsletter and social media team will cross promote as much as time allows.

After release day: Keep promoting! The algorithm’s attention span is short, but you can keep the momentum going. We will continue to share your stories, and in the weeks following, we will share some of the beautiful posts and/or stories of makers who buy your pattern and knit it in our yarn!