MARKETING VETERAN OPENS YARN STORE IN DOWNTOWN LAFAYETTE

There is a pillow in Karla Shelton’s office, embroidered by hand, that her Hungarian aunt made sometime in the last century. The stitches are very fine and very patient.

Shelton, who has run a digital performance marketing agency for 15 years and who thinks instinctively in metrics and conversion rates, keeps the pillow where she can see it. She learned to crochet at five, from that same aunt and her grandmother, in a household that treated the making of things as a matter of course. They are gone now, but the pillow remains. So does the crochet.

Last August, Shelton opened The Strand, a yarn and fiber arts studio tucked into the mezzanine level of the 1^st Source Bank building on North Fourth Street in downtown Lafayette.

The Strand is the only dedicated yarn shop in a county of over 200,000. She had spent a decade and a half helping other people’s businesses grow. So, when the market collapsed, she stepped into it. What she did not see coming was everything else: the waiting lists, the Thursday night regulars, the customer who walked in without friends and left with some. The store, it turns out, was the smallest part of what she built.

On June 8, The Strand marked its official grand opening with a ribbon cutting ceremony organized by Greater Lafayette Commerce, the region’s chamber of commerce and economic development organization. It had been nearly 10 months since Shelton opened, running what she calls a soft launch: learning the point-of-sale system, figuring out the inventory, taking feedback from a customer base that found her largely by word of mouth. She wanted to go slow. She wanted to get it right.

“Not every ribbon cutting is the same,” said Mikel Berger, president and CEO of Greater Lafayette Commerce. “Some of my favorite ones are like this. A couple of people with a good idea, a space they believed in, and the guts to go for it.”

To understand why the store exists at all, you have to understand what happened to Joann. When Joann Fabrics filed for bankruptcy in January 2025 and shuttered all 800-plus locations by May, cities like Lafayette were left with Hobby Lobby and Michaels as their only options for craft supplies.

For the area’s knitters, crocheters and spinners, that meant no access to natural-fiber wools, no independent dyers, no roving for spinners to draft into yarn. The fiber arts community had a name for it: a yarn desert.

The Strand is not the only local business to step into the gap. Earlier this month, Reasons and Seasons Quilting and Crafts celebrated its grand opening at 2725 Old US 231 S., bringing fabric, patterns and quilting supplies back to a community that had been driving out of town to find them. Demand, it turns out, doesn’t go away just because a store closes.

Joann’s closure left behind a market that was, by every measure, growing. According to KnitPro’s 2026 industry analysis, the global knitting and crochet market was estimated at roughly $10 billion in 2025 and is projected to nearly double by 2034, driven in large part by a demographic shift the industry did not see coming. The pandemic sent people indoors and toward their hands; Ravelry, the fiber arts social network, recorded its highest single-year total of published patterns ever in 2020, and a significant portion of the new crafters who picked up needles and hooks during lockdown never put them down.

More than 73% of crocheters are now between the ages of 18 and 34, according to Crochet Penguin. They discovered the craft on TikTok, where the hashtag has amassed more than 13 billion views. And many of them are not interested in acrylic blends from a chain store. They want natural fibers, independent dyers and a place where someone knows the difference.

A 2026 knitting yarn market report from DataIntelo shows that specialty stores — independent local yarn shops, fiber arts boutiques — held roughly 35% of distribution channel revenues in 2025. They are, by almost every measure, the part of the market that is growing fastest and that the chains were worst equipped to serve.

“I wish my grandmother and my aunt were alive to see this,” she says. “Never in a million years did I imagine I would own a yarn store and carry this tradition into my 60s.”

Shelton grew up outside Dayton, Ohio, steeped in Hungarian tradition. In middle school and into high school, she performed with a Hungarian dance troupe that traveled the Midwest. She returned to crochet a few years ago, and what pulled her back in was partly the craft itself and partly what she saw happening around it.

She started watching crochet influencers on YouTube and noticed that the people trying to make fiber arts a business were making elementary errors. They were buying materials at full price and selling finished goods at craft fairs, without margin, without anyone to share the overhead. Her marketing mind filed this away.

One early Find8 client she returns to: two men who had been laid off when a logistics company shuttered its hub in the area, who had nothing but their lawnmowers and an idea. Find8 helped build them into a thriving lawn care company.

“They went from no business to paying their mortgages and putting their kids through college,” she says. “Every day I jumped up and couldn’t wait to go to work.”

When Joann’s closure became certain, everything converged. She looked at the floor space in the building where she and her husband, William Shelton, already operated Find8 Performance Marketing. She thought about the gap. She thought about her grandmother. She signed a lease.

The Strand is not easy to find. It sits above a restaurant patio, invisible from the street — what Shelton calls, with some affection, her platform nine and three-quarters. You have to know it’s there.

In the soft launch months, that was fine; the people who found her were exactly the people she needed to find her, the word-of-mouth spreading through Lafayette’s maker community the way patterns do, person to person, and fast. By opening day, there was already a crowd.

The store launched as a crochet studio — Shelton’s area of deepest fluency, the craft she has known since she was five — and pivoted within the first week, because the market had other ideas. Knitters arrived. Spinners arrived. They asked for roving, which is raw fiber that spinners draft into yarn, and for natural wools, and for the indie dyers whose work circulates among serious makers the way small-press books circulate among serious readers.

The commercial lines Shelton had stocked, including solid workhorses like Lion Brand, were fine as far as they went. They did not go far enough. Shelton began stocking what people actually wanted, starting with Ruby & Roses, a local hand-dyer run by a young artist named Addy Dillingham who became one of The Strand’s earliest partners. She brought a hand-dyeing operation in-house. When the “Melt the ICE” hat — a red pointed beanie drawn from Norwegian WWII resistance symbolism and part of what makers were calling craftivism — went viral in early 2026 and red yarn sold out at distributors nationwide, The Strand dyed its own.

Running the store day to day falls to a small team. Tara Williamson handles operations and serves as head instructor for both knitting and crochet classes, the two-hour sessions that have developed a waiting list. Dara Chaffee keeps the floor running, managing inventory and processing deliveries as they come in.

Perhaps the store’s most distinctive feature is a program called the Collective, which gathers makers every Thursday evening for what is formally a meeting and practically a community.

Members share work in progress, troubleshoot patterns and sell finished goods on commission through a shared booth at the Historic Lafayette Farmers Market — where you can find The Strand on Saturday mornings — operating under the store’s brand umbrella and accessing wholesale pricing on materials they’d otherwise pay retail price for.

The structure is, at its core, a cooperative model applied to craft commerce, the kind of solution that is obvious in hindsight and that nobody had bothered to build locally until someone with a marketing background and a personal stake in the outcome arrived to build it.

“It’s very difficult to make any money as a solo maker,” Shelton said. “This gives people a real path.”

But the path the Collective has carved isn’t only financial. Look around the room on a Thursday night, Shelton says, and you will notice something: a significant number of the people there are neurodivergent.

They found The Strand, and then they found each other, and now Thursday is the night they come back to. The store has become, for a community that often struggles to locate belonging in conventional social spaces, something closer to a home base.

“With Find8, the motivation was delivering results,” she says. “Here it’s more emotion. Seeing people connect. Seeing people happy with their craft.”

This, Berger suggested, is precisely what a chamber of commerce struggles to quantify and cannot afford to ignore.

“One of the things we talk about at Greater Lafayette Commerce is what makes a community worth choosing,” Berger said. “And the honest answer is, it’s the texture of daily life,” he said. “It’s whether this place feels like somewhere you actually want to be. That’s what a business like The Strand adds to our community.”

Shelton and her husband have been working with Purdue University’s entrepreneurship program to map what they call, the yarn desert problem — identifying the 10 Midwestern markets most in need of what The Strand provides, towns with maker communities and no dedicated local yarn shop, the Lafayettes that didn’t get a Karla Shelton.

The plan is to expand into them, using the same multi-location methodology that Find8 has applied for years to other people’s businesses, now turned on their own.

“We’ve always asked ourselves: what if we did this for ourselves?” she said.

It is the question of any consultant who has spent years building other people’s dreams. The Strand is, among other things, the answer.

She would like more space eventually — 2,700 to 3,000 square feet, ideally downtown, ideally with street parking that does not penalize customers after two hours. The current location is, she acknowledges, imperfect. It is also, she acknowledges, thriving.

One thing Shelton has noticed about crafters is that they almost never make things for themselves. Knitters and crocheters make for their families, their friends, strangers who need blankets or hats or something warm.

They donate. There is an entire culture of making built not around acquisition but around giving, and it runs through every Thursday night and every farmer’s market booth and every finished object that leaves this store and ends up in someone else’s hands.

“That pay-it-forward thing,” she said, “just brings so much light into my life.”

She would know. The craft was given to her before she knew what to do with it. She is simply passing it on.