Thread Together
Sophia Judish, Jordyn Manning, Nazanin Hassanzadeh, Jaden Jung
When Joann’s announced its bankruptcy and closure in early 2025, it sent shockwaves through the crafting and creating communities across the United States, even making it into a Saturday Night Live skit. While competitors like Michaels and Hobby Lobby still offer general craft supplies, neither provides the large, affordable fabric selections that Joann’s once did. For many seamstresses, small business owners and hobbyists, especially those outside major cities, sourcing quality fabric has become a real challenge. Small fabric stores are few and far between, and buying online often means paying expensive premiums or committing to a minimum order of 20 yards or more, far more than what’s needed for smaller projects. Our solution is an in-store interactive screen that connects members of the local sewing community, making it easy to trade, browse, and request fabric directly from eachother. Users can post leftover fabric for swap with other users in the community. The product would allow users to request swatches from others for in-person comparison, and explore available materials filtered by properties like color, texture, or fiber content. With trades facilitated safely through the store, this system facilitates local access to quality fabric, reduces environmental harm caused by fabric waste, and strengthens community ties in the crafting world.
To understand the challenges of fabric sourcing, we conducted research through two different methods. We used an online survey and then in-depth interviews of University of Washington students who sew as a hobby. Our research targeted students who are involved in sewing or textile arts. We sourced students interested in sewing from a variety of backgrounds, including those active in campus RSOs like MESH, drama costuming teams, and individuals who use the shared sewing machines in the MILL. The survey was collected on Google Forms and distributed through group chats and social media outreach to groups who were likely to have individuals who sew. It gathered responses from students of a variety of majors and sewing experience levels. Most of the participants reported being intermediate level sewers. Interviews were conducted in relaxed settings on campus or in nearby coffee shops, and were one hour in duration per individual. We chose the combination of these two methods because the Google Form was able to collect a more broad assortment of ideas but not go into as much depth. On the other hand, the in-person interviews allowed us to deeply understand a smaller section of individuals’ motivations. Our primary stakeholders and college-age hobbyist sewers who would directly use the platform. Secondary stakeholders are the individuals who work at the craft store or community-crafting location where the platform is located. Tertiary consumers include the larger crafting community who benefits from facilitating crafting community ties and the UW community as a whole, who benefits from reducing waste in the local area.
Throughout our design research, we discovered several interesting results. First, we discovered that participants highly value the tactile experience of in-person fabric shopping. Across both the surveys and interviews, participants described how important it was to them to physically touch and examine fabric, whether to feel the texture, see the color in person, or access the quality and thickness of the material. This need spanned across all demographics in our research, including gender and skill level. The participants noted that this was an aspect of fabric shopping that online fabric stores failed to support. Several individuals described times when they ordered fabric online but it did not meet their expectations, leading to project delays, costly returns, or waste of the fabric.
Second, many individuals described the struggle of wandering through shelves of fabric and not being able to find what they were looking for. For instance, they would find a fabric online in a store’s inventory, but when they would come into the store to look for it, it would involve an endless through shelves of fabric that had been put back in the incorrect locations. Sometimes, even the staff would not be able to locate this fabric. Participants described wanting a streamlined way to search for and find the fabric they wanted, without the guessing games. They expressed interest in a way to search for fabric by a variety of different criteria, often saying material and color were the most important factors.
On the other hand, participants also described how they sometimes wanted to be surprised by the fabric they found in-store. Some individuals described how when they were lacking inspiration, they would go to a fabric store just to walk around and see if any new fabrics would spark their imagination for a project. If everything needed to be searched for, some felt that it would limit their ability to think outside of the box or find a specific fabric that they might not normally work with. Some other common themes we found were that individuals commonly wasted fabric and that in smaller fabric stores they sometimes could not find what they were looking for. Overall, we found that no matter the individual’s skill level or purpose for needing fabric, whether it be sewing clothes or quilting, they often shared similar requests for what would allow them the best fabric shopping experience.
Our proposed solution is a screen that can be placed in a location where fabric-users frequent and there is support staff, like fabric stores or the MILL. It functions as a device that can bring together the sewing community to swap fabrics that they do not use, or otherwise purchase unused fabrics second hand from the community. The fabric would be stored within the building, sort of like a thrift store, so that the users could still manually feel the fabric and see if it meets their needs. The platform would enable them to use a multi-function search feature to search for fabrics by a wide variety of different factors, streamlining the process for those who know exactly what fabric they want (screen 3 in diagram below). For those who want to be inspired by fabrics, the home screen of the platform would be a rotating “explore” page with profiles of different fabrics that have been listed (screen 1 below). Users would be able to purchase others’ fabrics or swap their fabric for another (screens 2, 5 and 6 below). There would be a board for both posting your own fabric and for posting a request for a type of fabric you are in search of.
