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 updated a few things about our designer support program, so please give this another read-through before you send in your 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 to alternates.
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, who often have different requirements for lead time or cross promotion, means we all need to communicate clearly, 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! Tech editing and test knitting are important in crafting a quality pattern. Plus, size inclusivity and test knitting go hand in hand. We strongly suggest planning your test window with this in mind. Larger sizes, especially for garment patterns, will often need more time to be completed. We want your test window to allow testers of every size to complete their garment in its entirety, and if this means you need to push back your release date, we will be more than happy to work with you to secure a new date for release and promotion! We hope that your pattern testers will be excited to test in Spincycle, which is why, upon request, 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 pattern’s approximate release date from the outset. We know this may change based on testing, tech editing, and photography, but it is very important for us to have a target date. Why? We often have several designer collabs in process at once, while also managing the production needs of our 70+ stockists. Knowing your target release date a few months ahead of time lets us ensure 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 the photo shoot!!!

We want to be able to cross promote your pattern in our weekly newsletter and/or 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* a minimum of two weeks before the release date. We know that sounds like a long lead time, but our social media and marketing teams plan posts, newsletters, KALs and other promotions several weeks ahead.

* 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);
Portrait orientation, with 3:4 or 4:5 dimensions is ideal;
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 all of this. While our busy production and marketing teams don’t have time to edit or retake photos that don’t meet requirements, we do want this collaboration to be successful for everyone. If you are new to design and have questions or need clarification at any point in this process, please don’t hesitate to ask! We will be more than happy to share what we’ve learned along the way.

When you are ready to design, reach out to designersupport@spincycleyarns.com with your contact info, shipping address, and a list of what you need for yarn support, and we will get this ball rolling! Please include yarn line, colorway(s) and yardage needs. If you are pairing Spincycle with another yarn for your pattern, please let us know and be sure to cc both companies on all important emails. 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! And remember, if you are pairing Spincycle with another yarn in your pattern, that company may have its own requirements and/or timeline, so please take both into consideration and, whenever possible and appropriate, cc both companies on important emails.

3-6 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.

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. Upon your request, 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. For garments, a good rule of thumb is that larger sizes generally need up to 3 months to complete testing. Please factor this into your timeline!

1-2 months before target release date: Send us a draft copy, even if it is still in testing. We may want to have our own sample made for retail display, 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 with us and with any other yarn company or maker involved. If we have other releases that conflict with the date, we can try to move some things around.

At least 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 uploaded, 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 newsletters go out on Thursdays, but they are written and proofed earlier in the week. We need your link no later than the Monday of the week we plan to promote your pattern. If we don’t have photos and a link to the pattern by that Monday, we will not be able to promote in Thursday’s newsletter.

The night before: Check your Instagram links 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!

Feature promotion:

In the spirit of transparency, here’s a little more on how we decide which pattern(s) to feature every week:

The algorithm encourages us to make only one grid post per day, and several of our posts each week are dedicated to promoting and marketing yarns fresh off the production line. That leaves us several posting opportunities per week to feature patterns, but sometimes we have multiple designers releasing patterns in the same week! That leaves us with some hard decisions about which patterns to feature. We take into account the quality of pattern, how creatively you have used our yarn, the quality of the photoshoot, and how size inclusive the pattern is.

And even on the busiest week, if we can’t dedicate a grid post to your pattern, we will still get it out there. Our newsletter has LOTS of subscribers, with great stats on clicks and views, meaning that our customers read to the end and use those links to buy yarns and patterns! And those customers are there on purpose, which, tbh, is more than we can say for IG some days. The newsletter subscribers are loyal and active customers!

We also find that IG stories are sometimes better at getting follower views than the grid, and we love stacking up lots of photos from a new pattern drop. Your testers can tag us and expect a re-story, which gives our customers lots of options and inspo for their own project!