Working in a yarn store

I’ve been working roughly 1 year in a large yarn store in Helsinki. The company is importing almost all of the yarns it is selling. The same company has couple of stores in Finland. The selection in the store consists of different kinds of yarns and supplies for knitting, crochet and weaving. There for example is sock yarns, wool yarns for making accessories and clothes, mohair yarns for making scarves, cotton yarns for crochet, twine for warp, cotton elastic stripes for making carpets and baskets, wool for spinning and felting, knitting needles and crochet hooks and so on. My favourite products are super soft alpaca yarns for accessories, black soft rope (Paula punoskude) for crocheting baskets, good quality large crochet hooks, carbon fiber needles, and bling bling yarns, which I use for spinning crazy yarns.

My work consists mostly of customer service, being cashier, tidying, filling the shelves with yarns and ordering yarns. I like a lot customer service. I help people to find the perfect yarns for their purposes. It is interesting mystery to be solved when we start to seek the right equipement and yarns for the customer. I always ask about the project for what the customer is looking for the yarn. If the customer wants to make socks, it is easy to walk to the sok yarn section. After that I try to find out the preferences of the customer. For example, does she (in most cases she) want the socks to be thick or thin, or have artistic colors (pattern, stripes, gradient shifts), or have special fibers. We find out the amount of yarn she needs by weighting ready made samples from the particular yarn, or by finding models from our pattern library.

I try to analyse also what kind of craft person she is. For example, is she experimenta, or does she like to use yarns that she knows already. Is she a person who values over all functionality, looks, feel of the yarn or quality? What kind of aestetics is she aiming to have in the project (traditional, childish, masculine, gothic, natural, artistic, crafty etc.)? What ever is the case, I always try to find the best yarns for their needs. I want to make sure I’m offering the best quality. When people start to do crafts themselves, the most significant things are, that the process and the produt are pleasurable.

Tidying and putting the yarns on display is what we mostly do, when there is no customers to serve. The product display is interesting thing, and there is so many opinions about that. The looks of the store affects a lot to it’s brand. If there is not many products on display, and they are put in very fine and small piles, I would think that the prices are high. Messy store with huge amonts of yarns and lot of discount items make it look cheap. Does the company want it’s stores to look cheap or expensive? And which one is better? Which one makes more profit? What if an expensive store looks like a cheap one, or vice versa? I think that our store is somewhere between. We try to keep the shelves and boards tidy and the yarns in straigh piles, but there is a lot of yarns and discounts. The products should be put it shelves the way that it is easy to reach the right yarns without making mess or make the piles of yarns to fall down.

When I’m a cashier, I try to meet each customer as an interesting human being. I say hello and look in the eyes of the customer. I’m quite cheerful naturally, so it is nice if I can make the customer smile. If there is no line, I might have a small talk with the customer. I can also mention about our special offers if it seems like relevant, and tell about our knitting meetings and our customer membership advantages.

As working in customer service, I’d like to learn to focus even more to the needs of the customer. I weave a lot, so it is easy for me to serve customers who need materials for that. When it comes to knitting shirts or other bigger garments, I’m a bit lost in estimating how much yarn is needed. I’ve been planning to knit a shirt, to get better understanding on the patterns, amounts of yarn and which yarns are best for such purpose.