EAST LONGMEADOW — This year was supposed to be filled with celebration for Valerie Morton.
May marked the 15th anniversary of owning Quilts & Treasures Inc. But instead of fanfare to observe the milestone, COVID-19 stirred up memories of a difficult time early in her journey as a small business owner: the Great Recession.
“Things were really tough when the Recession hit,” Morton said. “But I don’t feel like I’m living hand to mouth like I was in 2008. I’ve been able to rebound a little.”
The global pandemic and subsequent stay-at-home advisories dealt Quilts & Treasures a financial blow that Morton says she hasn’t even sat down to calculate yet. Like many other retail shops in the commonwealth, Quilts & Treasures was ordered to close its doors in March, reopening at the beginning of June.
Prior to the closure, Morton was set to host a three-day sewing retreat in Rhode Island — one in a series of annual craft outings the shop hosts. Eighty people reserved a spot for the weekend for $250 each. After the event was canceled, some participants were OK with receiving store credit, but not all. Many people requested a refund.
“It was really hard,” said Morton. “I went home and sat on my living room floor, and just cried.”
The retreat, special events and classes have been a staple of her business. But with the pandemic, all of those social engagements have been put on hold.
“Quilting is an activity that’s really social and really fun to get together to do,” she said.
During the closure, Morton tried to shift her business to an online platform — something she had never embarked upon before. The service allowed customers to pick up purchases curbside. She’s even taken to FaceTiming with customers, so they can pick out fabric themselves. While she says the platform is still admittedly a “work in progress,” the website is receiving online orders daily.
Mindy Camrye, one of the shop’s workers, says it was hard to keep up with the curbside sales at times. Quilts & Treasures has 15 employees, but because several have spouses or children that are immunocompromised, many have not returned back to work just yet. The business did, however, receive funding courtesy of the Paycheck Protection Program, a $349 billion emergency loan program launched in April by the U.S. Small Business Administration through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES).
Administered by a national network of banks and credit unions at a local level, the loans are designed to maintain the viability of small businesses facing financial struggles during the pandemic.
Stephen Power repairs a sewing machine at his workshop in the back of Quilts & Treasures Inc. Sewing machine repair appointments are scheduled until November.Emily Thurlow / Special to The Republican
A tight-knit community
Because the quilting community tends to be very social and active, Morton said many people were getting together via video conferencing software like Zoom to meet up to three days a week. Quilts & Treasures has regular customers from as far away as Southern Connecticut and Adams. It was brought to the shop’s attention that organizations such as visiting nurses and home care groups needed hundreds of masks and asked for help. Quilts & Treasures donated several pieces of material toward the effort.
“No one was charging for anything. It was about keeping people safe,” said Camrye. “Sometimes they’d look like back-alley deals as we’d drop off a spool here or a piece of elastic there in a Ziploc bag left on the steps of people’s homes.”
After being closed for three months, Morton said she anticipated her shop would be busy, but had no idea what to expect. Mask-making and has brought both the veteran crafter and novice out of the woodwork. For the newbie, she has been encouraging beginner quilting projects.
While limited to two employees in the store at a time — and given that not all of her employees have returned — Morton says she’s been working 12-hour days.
Once the initial panic from the reopening of businesses began to even out, customers began raiding the shop’s extensive novelty fabric section. The shop, which boasts more than 3,000 bolts of fabric, sold out almost immediately of fabrics with prints featuring Harry Potter, New England sports teams and superheroes. Surprisingly, Morton noted, fabric featuring Disney princesses was not as popular.
Unlike the long-time quilter, novices tend to seek much smaller amounts of fabric, like one quarter of a yard rather than two yards or more of each. However, the shop does not have any limitations on purchasing fabric.
Harder than it seams
With higher demand in the industry, both small stores and larger chains are seeing shortages that they’ve never experienced before.
With masks being one of the top reasons people are heading to a fabric store, Quilts & Treasures began selling Creative Grids’ 3-in-1 face mask template. The store has sold more than 100 copies of the template, which makes small-, medium- or large-sized masks.
Another item that’s flying off the shelves is elastic. The item is something Morton has never ordered before, but have sold more than 1,400 yards of it, she said. Some products are still on backorder.
Fabric stabilizers are another unlikely item that have been in high demand. Typically used in shirt collars or in pocketbooks, many consumers have flocked to Quilts & Treasures to purchase fabric stabilizers for the inside of masks.
At one point, consumers even wiped out the shop’s inventory of sewing machine needles.
Additionally, many sewing machines that people had “retired” to a closet, cellar or attic have been pulled out and brought to Quilts & Treasures to be repaired. In fact, Stephen Power, who has been repairing sewing machines in the back of the East Longmeadow shop, is currently booking appointments into November.
And for those that didn’t want to wait to have their older model repaired, sales for newer models began to soar, so much so that there are reported delays throughout the entire world. Though Quilts & Treasures is an authorized dealer of the Pfaff brand, for the time being sales of sewing machines is on hold.
“No one could have foreseen that kind of demand,” said Morton. “And no one did. Not Jo-Ann’s, not Walmart … no one.”
Jo-Ann Stores Inc. — which is headquartered in Hudson, Ohio, and operates more than 800 Jo-Ann Fabrics and Crafts stores throughout the country — offered online ordering and curbside pickup during Gov. Charlie Baker’s stay at home advisory ordering “nonessential” businesses to close their doors. The chain also opened classrooms strictly set up for mask-making with sewing machines, guidance and materials to help make facemasks and covers, gowns and other items to be sent to hospitals around the U.S.
Shauntina Lilly, a spokesperson for the company, said that by late July the sewing community made more than 230,790,000 masks through the chain’s mask kits, fabric donations and support from its partners.
The company SVP Worldwide, which comprises the Singer, Pfaff and Husqvarna Viking sewing brands, has increased production for its Pfaff and Husqvarna Viking facilities, according to Dean Brindle, the company’s chief marketing officer. Though he wouldn’t disclose specific figures, Brindle said that overall, the company has seen growth in all three brands in the range of 20% to 30%.
That growth extends to its spectrum of price points. For Pfaff and Husqvarna Viking products, prices begin at $300 to $400 and cap off near $16,000 to $17,000 for the manufacturer’s suggested retail price.
In late March and April, Singer outperformed the other two brands primarily because of its existing online presence, he added.
As one of the world’s largest manufacturers of sewing needles, Brindle said SVP Worldwide has its own factory in Brazil and has increased its output to meet the growing global demands.
And while the demand for sewing machines remains on the upswing, that demand isn’t only geographically centered around North America. Brindle says it’s felt globally.
“Our demand at SVP Worldwide could fill virtually every consumer sewing factory in the world for the balance of the year,” he said. “We expect supply constraints to last throughout 2020, believe it or not.”