Untitled

[vida-imensa]

Luke Abrahams

[b1ythe]

[diamondshapedaura-deactivated20]

[sleepy-bebby]

Icelandic horses at Skógafoss, Iceland 🇮🇸

[memeuplift]

[catchymemes]

[honeypunks]

#girlboss voice become ungovernable (via @cupcakesandtv)

[mymysterium]

Love this

[ethicalmemes]

yes we will :) #EthicalMemes

[rosyy-coosy]

📸 nelika_l

[aidashakur]

[postcatholicism]

lovers locks yesterday

[brigids-flame]

my mom sent this to me today and i really love this.

[once-a-polecat]

So, what’s new in the knitting community today Polecat? Well, I’m glad you asked because it’s these guys.

The fuck? You ask. Those sound like a couple of hustle culture, low level tech bros. Yes, yes they are. And they spent $80,000 on a knitting domain name thinking that they’re going to make millions.

Yes.

Really.

Do they knit? No.

Are they aware of Ravelry (the leading social media & marketplace site for knitters & crocheters)? Also, no.

Have they reached out to notable knitting pattern designers? Also, no.

Are they familiar with the culture of Local Yarn Stores? Also, no.

Does one of them at least have a 6 year old who learned to use a knitting loom? Yes!

Did they make a terrible podcast that insulted and talked down to their future clientele? You betcha.

Needless to say, Reddit & Twitter ripped them a new one. It has been very amusing.

[thedoctorknits]

………….

[swords-n-spindles]

It's two days later and I can find ZERO information on their blog about this project, except for the "knitting community response" post. I can, however, reconstruct from reddit and twitter how utterly and thoroughly they got eviscerated by the knitting community, and it's a delight to watch.

[once-a-polecat]

I got you friend….

Courtesy of the Wayback Machine

(The podcast seems genuinely missing however.)

[amaltheametalweld]

I listened to bits of the podcast bc I honestly just kept waiting for them to say something meaningful instead of throwing out buzzwords like that replaced having an actual plan...and let me tell you the techbros have no plan and even less respect.

They consider their only real competition to be box stores, China, and grannies who have run a blog for 20 years. 😬

And the Chinese are apparently disadvantaged because they don't list things properly, they don't knit, and they can't do videos because no one wants to see Asians in videos. Customers only want to see "western people" in their opinion.

It's implied the old ladies are in the same category as small businesses?

So there's all this good in-between market space that they can take advantage of to do... well they're gonna sell stuff apparently using Amazon. They clearly don't know what yet, but they're gonna have innovative stuff. At least a dozen products maybe more!

Their business model:

Also they didn't want to go with fishing as their new business because it's so simple with its lures and poles. No room for innovation there. 🙃

Would you be surprised they mentioned coming up with their ideas over drinks multiple times? Also they talked about it while on a road trip? They looked up the metrics on the word knitting and thought the market was reasonably in the 41k range. You know not too saturated or something?

Basically they're setting this up as a demonstration of look how I made my money and if you follow my capitalist recipe for just fucking around and hoping other people are stupid enough to click links on google, you too can make boatloads of money! type thing. So they didn't really think the knitters would find out about it this soon and dogpile on them for their bs, because if you listen to them they don't care about knitting. Their podcast wasn't for knitters. It was for other folk interested in get rich quick stuff. I think one of them said something like website names were the first NFTs as if that was a good thing.

They basically deserve every incensed remark at their little venture.

[themushroomtree]

Techbros and their bullshit are a pox on society.

[the-fibre-stuff]

It’s probably worth keeping an eye on the site, just in case they paid attention to all the people telling them that Ravelry already exists and decide to steal patterns from there to post on their site.

[kaiyonohime]

I want to laugh my ass off if they try selling the Queen Susan as a kit with plastic needles and four ply poly yarn available in seven colors.

Because these are the kinda guys that would totally do it and not understand the outrage.

[once-a-polecat]

My favorite Twitter response:

[Photo is a tweet from Twitter user @erin_bergren saying: “Wool is super scratchy- many knitters are looking for soft acrylic yarns in a range of colors. Consider packaging these in a way that can capitalize on trendy small crafts, like felted Christmas ornaments. You can make this work!”]

[kaiyonohime]

That makes my head hurt so bad.  Like yes, I get that some wools are scratchy and uncomfortable to work with.  But that’s completely excluding every other fiber in the world!  Silk, cotton, cashmere, bamboo, modal, yak, alpaca, etc.  And, honestly, wool itself is not a single fiber!  You have Shetland, Merino, Blue Face Leister, etc.  So when a knitter encounters a specific kind of wool that’s scratchy, they usually make a note of it and try different wools after.

The funny thing is that knitters also take notes on the acrylics they like and hate too, so if they do anything even slightly wrong in the production of acrylic yarn it won’t sell.  And let’s face it, these are the kind of guys that will find the cheapest slave labor in SE Asia they can to make the cheapest acrylic yarn they can, and it will be the shittiest on the market.

Knitters make themselves known with their spending.  It’s not a cheap hobby, and while most will look for good deals, we’ll certainly pay more for quality and humane products.  With all the bad blood these two dipshits started with, there’s zero chance for success now.  There wasn’t really any to start with given how they approached matters, but they could have attempted to start a new Webs online or something that had a more global presence.  But they didn’t properly do their research, wasted $80k USD on a domain, and became a laughing stock.  In less than a week.  That, in of itself, is actually fairly impressive.

[ravenofsilver]

Genuinely this is my new favorite Yarn Scandal.

I listened to a bit of the podcast but then had to stop bc they were making me physically nauseated. They did make me laugh tho when talking about how impractical one of their previous ventures had been! They’re treadmill endeavor had, apparently, been their lowest low but as of the beginning of that podcast they reeeeaaaaalllllyyyyyy thought they Had It.

Wonder how they feel about those treadmills now. ;3c

Honestly. How did they do absolutely no research into this market? Legit all they had to do was watch Seth Meyers and it would’ve been reason to be like “yknow maybe knitters aren’t actually Friendly Grandmas”

[the-fibre-stuff]

@kaiyonohime​ Pretty sure that tweet is trolling the dudes. My husband read it and started laughing. It’s almost plausible, right? What a great way to convince them to really screw themselves over, in case they didn’t quite manage on their own. (My husband’s only real context for soft acrylic yarn is me complaining about it. I don’t think he knows that some people like it, or about the nasty prank of recommending it to people who have trouble with acrylic.)

[kaiyonohime]

I honestly thought it was a relative or friend of them trying to help the situation and reassure them that they hadn’t gone completely and horribly wrong by telling them there was a still a market out there for them.  But also completely not knowing anything outside of the crap that people say about yarn when they know nothing about yarn themselves.

Because honestly, at this point, it could be either.  With the amount of drama they created, I kinda hope it comes out that it was one of their wives that was trying to smother the flames and then finding out gasoline was not the way to do that.  

[once-a-polecat]

No, it was someone completely trolling them.

Because

Acrylic

Doesn’t

Felt.

[lynati]

Since the knitting community overall has been less than accepting of a couple dudes showing up to insult them while talking about all the money they intend to make off of them, the techbros in question have wound up in the one place that shares an equal amount of their disdain for the rest of the knitting community and thus has been friendly towards them: the alt-right-leaning knitters of Blocked Magazine.  o.O

[jabberwockypie]

It’s a little unclear if the Knitting Bros:

a) Did Absolutely Zero Research (and are thus unaware of Blocked’s political affiliations) and perhaps contacted several publications, and Blocked was the only one that agreed to talk to them

b) Did Not Do Any Research (but will be fine with the nazi thing once they find out about it)

c) Were Well Aware of the nazi thing but have decided that’s their niche

or

d) If Blocked reached out to the Knitting Bros. (presumably to commiserate about how MEAN the other knitters are and something something Cancel Culture something something)

[image description - a knitted plush dumpster fire]

All in all, EXCELLENT business decisions all around.

[bemusedlybespectacled]

I'll be honest, "the Knitting Bros ally with fascist knitters" is not the way I expected this story to go but also I don't know why I didn't expect it because that is 100% par for the course

[kotaamorris]

[erickalarissa]

no more distractions … full focus on my growth.

[moonachilles]

Jane Austen really said ‘I respect the “I can fix him” movement but that’s just not me. He’ll fix himself if knows what’s good for him’ and that’s why her works are still calling the shots today.

[nitewrighter]

Meanwhile Emily Brönte just said “We can make each other worse.” 

[theonlycabbage]

Mary Shelley said, "I can make him

[theminimalisto]

[tresbongout]