Store Spins 30 Year Yarn Starting With the Basics

It’s not often that a person can make their passion into a successful business, but so is the case for Aylin Bener, owner of Aylin’s Woolgatherers, a yarn store in Loehmann’s Shopping Center on Arlington Boulevard in Falls Church.

Next month, Aylin’s will be celebrating its 30th anniversary by holding a three-day storewide sale starting on the sixth.

Bener first opened the door to her store on January 2, 1975. At the time the store was located in the Wilston Shopping Center, site of another yarn store that had gone under the previous year. It wasn’t until eight years later that Aylin's moved to the Loehmann’s center.

With the assistance of close friend Wynn Gnan, owner of Woolgatherers, a yarn store in Washington, D.C., Bener has overcome all the odds against starting and sustaining a successful business.

According to the Small Business Administration, over 95% of new businesses fail within the first five years, and few manage to stay open for the three decades that Bener has continued to deal in both yarns and her passion for knitting and crocheting.

Bener became friends with Gnan years before the opening of her store, being one of Gnan’s best customers. A lifetime knitter, Bener would frequently come to the store for supplies, advice, and conversation. Over the years their friendship grew close and finally, they decided to open a second store as a joint venture.

After looking around, they found a yarn store for sale owned by two women, but its asking price was too high. After some consideration they decided to pass on the purchase, unwilling to pay top dollar for an overpriced and insufficient stock.

But just as they began to doubt they could take on another store, they were contacted by the building's landlord, asking if they were still interested in the space. It turned out that the previous owners, unable to keep the business going and afford the lease, had locked the store one night slipped off and never returned. Trying to avoid a complete loss, the landlord asked if Bener and Gnan would be willing to take over the rent and use the space.

With the prospect now a reality, Gnan realized that she didn’t have the energy to own two yarn stores and asked if Bener would take on the store with Gnan acting as an advisor. Bener agreed, and in January she opened Aylin’s Woolgatherers for the first time; the name being an amalgam of Bener’s name and Gnan’s store.

At the time, Bener knew very little about running a business. “If we had known all the do's and don'ts about business we probably wouldn’t have started it,” she said. But two things made the business work, Bener's love of the craft and the assistance of Gnan.

It is Bener’s belief that in order to sell something well, you have to know about it personally. An avid knitter and crotchetier, she knew about every type of yarn and tool she sold. Along with selling materials, Bener taught classes on knitting, crocheting and needlepoint, enabling her to not only sell to long time knitting fans but also to a new clientele.

“Everything I sell in the store I can back up with personal knowledge,” she said. Meanwhile, Gnan was introducing her to the wider industry. She took her to New York where she met designers and wholesalers, people that she would come to use often as her store grew.

Since 1975 the world of yarn has changed drastically, and with it Bener’s store. When she first opened there were two types of yarn: wool and acrylic. The patterns and designs for knitting and crocheting were limited to old fashioned sweaters, shawls and other traditional textiles.

“It had it’s following, but it didn’t grab young fashion-minded people,” Bener said.

But over the past decade there has been a dramatic revolution in the industry. Popular designers picked up on the old form and quickly started introducing new patterns and designs. As the designs grew so too did the choice of fibers. A far cry from the two choices of yarn in basic colors, everything from rayon to ribbon is now available in a rainbow of sparkles, shades and textures.

“It’s not your grandmother’s sweater,” Bener added. “It came out of the closet, if you will.”

With the growth in the industry, Bener realized that she had to start specializing in just knitting and crocheting. She and 17 other shop owners in the area joined together to form the Metropolitan Area Needlework Retailers Association (MANRA). The shops included stores specializing in sewing, quilting, needlepoint, knitting, crocheting and all the other textile crafts.

Instead of carrying tools for a range of activities, each store is able to specialize in one form. Then, if customers come by looking for something they don’t carry they refer them to one of the other nearby stores. This has allowed Bener to focus on knitting and crocheting and carry a wider range of the ever growing selection of yarns.

As the craft developed Bener’s customers started changing. She was seeing more young people wanting to learn to knit and eager to find interesting fibers and patterns.

Suddenly the craft that Bener had been practicing for years became a trend. Scarves were hitting retail shelves and people were interested in trying new things. Popular clothier Abercrombie & Fitch now sells knit scarves for $49.50, and The Gap sells its classic knit cardigans for as much as $59.50.

It was no longer true that the only people knitting were the older women who had kept the craft alive for generations. More and more often, younger women and even men are learning how to knit. Now when she goes out, Bener is encouraged by all the people she sees taking part in what once was a neglected art. “It's become alright to knit in public,” she said.

Bener expects that the trend will be long lived. As a hobby, knitting is surprisingly addictive. It combines a repetitive activity with the intellectual challenge of math and spatial relations and the additional bonus of working towards a material goal.

It also provides a clear avenue for improvement. At its most basic, knitting is a simple craft. There is only one basic stitch that is used to create a variety of nuanced stitches, cables, and patterns. While the complexities can seem overwhelming, it is essentially just two techniques, the stitch and the pearl.

While working with needles to make a stitch seems difficult, Bener said that she can teach the basic principles of knitting and crocheting in a matter of minutes. From there a person is on track right away to make simple things like scarves or blankets; items without seams or shapes.

Then as a person’s confidence and comfort levels increase, she or he is able to take on larger, more sophisticated projects. The ease of beginning and the room for advancement makes it interesting for both beginners and long time participants.

Bener’s own love affair with knitting started when she was a young girl in Turkey; too young to remember exactly how she learned. Her earliest memory is of trying to convince her father that she was knitting her doll a sweater. Her father would act like he didn’t believe her and would tell her to show him, then when she would do a stitch he would act like he hadn’t seen and get her to do another.

“I must have been pretty young, or slow, not to have figured it out,” Bener laughed.

Her own learning curve in the craft included more than a few hiccups. Her first large project was a sweater. Upon completing the project, she discovered that the sleeves reached to her mid-thigh and the body barely covered her naval. Not despairing, she took apart the entire sweater and used the yarn to make a new coat.

Growing up, everyone around her knitted or sewed, both men and women. One of her best teachers was her uncle, a large man who worked for a mining company. After work he would come home and knit to relax and relieve stress.

When she moved to America she noticed that people were more interested in factory produced materials than homemade products. Still, she continued to knit and crochet as she worked in Northern Virginia as an executive assistant with Northrop Grumman, until the opportunity finally opened up to run her own store.

As she has run her store she has also been able to promote a tradition that was being forgotten in America. When she was growing up in Turkey knitting was a social skill. Friends would sit and knit as a way to spend time together. As she started her own store she was able to create that same community.

In the classes that she has taught and arranged, she has worked with people who have since become loyal customers, sometimes even employees. In fact, all of the women working at Aylin’s Woolgatherers are themselves skilled knitters, many having learned to knit in classes at the store.

Bener said that they are the reason for much of the store’s success.

While they share a love of handmade textiles, they come from a wide range of backgrounds. Among them, Rema Lisenby is a former physical therapist now retired. She got into knitting as a way to relieve the stress she was feeling from taking care of a parent with Alzheimer’s Disease. Eventually she turned her hobby into a job at the store.

Also working at the store is Dawn Lanphier, a former financial planner. She started taking classes at the store with a friend looking for a hobby to do together. While they still take classes together, Lanphier decided to start working at the store as well. Other professions, former and current, of those on Bener’s payroll include a retired state department employee and a lawyer specializing in constitutional law.

“You can come here for therapy of all kinds,” joked Lisenby. In 2000 Bener negotiated for another room in the shopping center to open a separate classroom. Classes are now taught nearly every day by staff and popular designers. Students sign up in advance to learn basic skills, new techniques, or just get some quick help on a difficult project.

For those interested in just trying it, knitting isn’t expensive to get into. Needles can cost as little as $6 and skeins of standard yarn can go for as little as $4. But just as there is a lot of room for creativity in the field, so too is there a wide range of prices. Hand made needles intricately carved in birch wood can cost as much as $40 and hand dyed, hand made fibers can cost as much as $90 a skein. But the choice is up to the customer, and with thousands of colors, textures, and fibers available, the choices are extensive.

The variety has made things a little more difficult for Bener. With the explosion in products she has had to implement a computerized inventory and has to spend more time keeping track of, and learning about what she sells. Still, after a long day at her store she can go home, put her feet up, and perhaps knit something, just to relax.