On 20th October we announced in our blog posting End of an Era, the closure of our web shop. This brought to an end Buttercup Miniatures offering needles, yarns and accessories. A month prior we announced the discontinuation of printed patterns. As Bob Dylan sang “The times they are a changin’”. And that is what we’d like to stress in this post. Things are changing at Buttercup Miniatures, but are not coming to an end.
Since 1999 Buttercup Miniatures has gone through a number of evolutions. A three part history as part of our 10th birthday year celebrations described the evolution from hobby to dolls house fairs to online trading. So it’s not a new thing for us to move onto the next stage of the business.
So, why now?
Well, a number of issues have come together that have made us review where we are, and more importantly, where we are going. The printed patterns side of things had been replaced by instantly downloadble PDF’s from our blog, Ravelry and LoveKnitting. When our supplier of the wires from which we make the needles announced their retirement in the summer, we were faced with losing our needle business. Add to this the increasing minimum order requirements that other suppliers were demanding it made sense to move away from physical goods. We’ve always tried to give our customers the best possible service and through events outside of our control it was becoming increasingly more difficult.
What happens next?
Frances now has more time to design in the various scales of 1:6th, 1:12th, 1:24th and indeed full size. So the focus now is to continue to develop the digital patterns side of things and offer them through this blog. We think you’ll find this year’s free Advent Calendar, which will be published here from 1st December, will give a flavour of what is planned for the future.
In some ways it’s sad to leave the old behind but equally exciting to look forward to the next version of Buttercup Miniatures. We hope you’ll like it too.