Behind the Yarn: My Experience Working with Hobbii

Although I will try my best to not turn this article into a hatchet job, if you’ve been following me for a while you’ll be aware that I was, until 30 days ago, a Freelance Designer for the gigantic, now Private Equity owned and AI-driven Danish yarn brand Hobbii.

First off, I want to preface this article by clarifying what my collaboration with Hobbii consisted of over the last few years.
I worked with them as a Freelance Designer, meaning that I was on a contract of sorts (the “we-can-drop-you-at-any-minute” ones), received free yarn and materials, often hundreds of Euros worth, and some very posh hooks, needles and other wonderful things. In return, I wrote knitting and crochet patterns for them and posted huge quanities of content on my own social media channels.

It is worth adding that I am not planning on referencing anything that other people have told me, or hearsay, or anything off Reddit, because I want to share my own experiences first hand. A lot of other designers are sharing their stories too and I suggest you read them, but this article is purely my own reality and feelings.

I would also like to say that I have no personal beef with any members of staff (well, maybe one, I hate passive aggression and rudeness), and I feel very sorry for everyone that lost their jobs recently. It’s devastating and they didn’t deserve what happened to them. The majority of Hobbii’s staff were truly passionate about their products and lovely to work with. You could argue that they were slightly complicit in allowing their exploitation-lite of designers to continue as it was, but so was I by choosing to collaborate with them. I do feel like a huge mug and was pretty deluded and slightly gaslit by them as a brand. I also have to work sitting next to piles of their yarn that I was gifted prior to the mess I am about to describe, and that leaves a sour taste.

Ok, now that’s done, let’s get teatime started, shall we?

I have never made any bones about the fact that I pride myself on being honest about bad behaviour in the knitting and crochet community, hell, I have written MANY IG posts, Stories, Threads and articles about it, and take my role as a designer seriously. I know that a lot of people follow me and my peers not only to see our work and enjoy our designs, but to get educated about certain things, find out which brands are sound and which are best avoided, get the heads up on “gossip” and enjoy hearing about the realities of working in the knitting and crochet community. I do feel that – although I am sure some people might look upon this article as me just being bitchy and an excuse to devour bunches of sour grapes – I intend this to be a way of helping fellow crafters make better choices about who they buy from and who they suppport. The greatest majority of people want to be reassured that they are spending their money on yarn from brands that care deeply about the crafting community. Wether I like it or now I have a platform that I built myself and have a position as someone who knows what I’m talking about, and that’s why I’m here writing this for you.

When I first started out, getting sent free yarn was the epitome of “I have arrived”. For crafters, not having to buy your own materials and being sponsored is a big thing, and you don’t tend to think too much about lump sum payments for your services. Luckily, people in our community these days are way more outspoken and clued up about their worth as creators, but when I started out it wasn’t so much the case. My initial work with Hobbii was quite simple: they sent me stuff to use and maybe review (no pressure to it, though), and I could say I was an ambassador, slap a snazzy little button on my blog, and brag about it in my IG bio.

Not long after, Hobbii opened up a new platform called Hobbii Plus and I was automatically added as a “Hobbii Plus Designer”. This meant that alongside continuing to recieve generous PR packages, I could now create patterns for them and have them added to their worldwide Plus Store, reaching, potentially, millions of people every day.

So, how did it work? Well, Hobbii would send out campaign emails to Plus Designers with details on potential collabs. They would be themed, Spring Vibes, Granny Square Day, Winter Clothing (reminder: no actual cash payment for this, ick), Kitchen Accessories, etc, and you could accept the invite or not. If you did, they’d send you a couple of documents to sign as an agreement, you’d tell them all the yarn you needed (and any extras like buttons), and they’d send it off to you. Once the stuff arrived, you had a start and finish date and had to post certain content on certain days in order to complete the campaign in time. If you missed a date you would… Well. Let’s just say it wasn’t exactly encouraged.

Unreasonable to expect so much for no money, right? Right. So why did I do it? I was drunk on free yarn and the commission I was making.

Plus Designers could charge what they wanted for their patterns and would recieve 100% of the revenue, save for the PayPal transaction fee when the cash was transferred to you. I could also add any existing patterns I had created and include them in my store, provided that I recommended alternative Hobbii yarns to use. My first commission paycheck from them was very almost in four-figure territory and I was elated. I was finally making money from my patterns in a meaningful way. It was fantastic and made a huge difference to my family’s finances, especially during the pandemic. Did I care that I wasn’t recieving a lump sum for my work and content creation? No. I was making far more money from them in pattern sales than Etsy or Ravelry. I was getting free yarn and expensive tools. I didn’t need to buy my own materials anymore, I had off-the-scale passive income and it was brilliant.

The whole thing seemed too good to be true, and reader, you already know where this is going. I became fiercely defensive of them as a brand given that I was earning so much money from them. If anyone on IG posted rants about how pushy their marketing was, I would jump down their throat and block them immediately. Subtle, I was not. I had Hobbii’s back.

All good, right?

Well. The penny started to drop for me when my husband (a very sensible, rational Virgo – is there any other type?) commented that Hobbii must have a shedload of cash available if they were able to send so many parcels out to so many people. Like, how were they able to do that? In fact, they were even sending fat bags of yarn out to people who weren’t even designers and who had smaller followings, meaning that at one point you could literally fart in Hobbii’s general direction and sacks of yarn would arrive on your doorstep. His words were “untenable”, “unsustainable”, and “bloody hell, MORE yarn?!” whenever a bag arrived. Not in a critical way, but concerned that this was surely a bubble fit to burst.

My yarn orders from them were always between 90 to 100€, and if you multiply that by all the other designers and crafters who were receiving free products… Well. You don’t need to be a spreadsheet person to see where that maths is heading. My feelings were somewhere between “aw, they’re so generous and good to us!” and “hmm, how long will this be able to carry on for?”.

After a while their demands started getting a little bit more arsey, for want of a better word. They started expecting significantly more. Slowly but surely, I noticed that their campaign emails were getting sharper in tone, and they were asking for way more content, again for no extra payment.

Let’s talk again about pattern commissions too, because alongside their demands getting more unreasonable, their payment system got clunkier, payment thresholds got way higher and sales suspiciously got lower. I will get into this later, but Hobbii also refused to give designers detailed breakdowns of their pattern sales, giving people an increasing smell of fish around the whole thing.

As for those new additional requirements, on average per campaign you had to put out at least four or five Story posts, a couple of Reels, and a couple of static posts showing your design process and also write a pattern and everything that involves. All this was tracked on a marketing app which barely worked, meaning that you also had to manually upload the content, an action that often took hours and was riddled with errors, because it was incapable of picking up your required “#sponsored and #CampaignName” social media hashtags automatically. Yet more unpaid labour, and unpaid labour of the soul-destroying, admin type. Yet another thing leaving you irritated and feeling ripped-off, and whenever this issue was flagged to your Hobbii marketing contact you were greeted with “well, that’s nothing to do with us, you need to email the platform and create a ticket with them, we can’t do anything, bye” sort of responses. Things were starting to feel less warm, crafty and yarny and more “we’re taking advantage of you but here’s more yarn to try and shut you up – lol” vibes.

Now, I have written before about how payment in yarn is ok if that’s what you’re into, especially when you’re starting out. Free products are great but only if there’s nothing expected of you. I often get sent free yarn from brands and this helps me create content for this very website. I get paid in ad/affiliate marketing revenue and don’t have to buy materials. I’m super happy with this right now and it’s a good labour exchange for me, however, when a brand asks for patterns or ANY content beyond what I’m comfortable with they get a friendly email with my rates. That’s the way I am. No judgement if you aren’t, but what Hobbii asked for went way beyond this. I mean, deadlines? When you aren’t paying us? Give your head a wobble. Trash behaviour.

There’s more. Hobbii also introduced new campaigns requiring people to write patterns for full-on, graded items of clothing. Now, if you’ve ever designed garments, you’ll know the amount of work that goes into making even one size of an item. So imagine when a company, again for no money, offers you just the yarn as “payment” for something which takes hours, in some cases hundreds of hours, to make a sweater or any piece that has to exist in at least four or five different sizes. It’s actually insulting.

As their expectations were becoming far more demanding, constantly posting Hobbii content started to affect people’s brand identity and motivation levels. When your entire feed starts to resemble a vassel state of Hobbii, you – and your followers – start to question yourself as a crafter. Am I making this stuff for me or for them? If it’s both, why do I feel like an exploited sack of shit when I do it? You get annoyed that every one of your posts is Sponsored. Maybe not annoyed by having free yarn – check the privilege – but because you can’t remember the last time you posted something you genuinely wanted to, unscripted, unprompted. Hobbii were using their unpaid Hobbii Plus Designers as mini adverts for them, slowly suffocating their feeds and damaging people’s reputations, and soon enough your followers and fans of yours would start to notice, get annoyed, bugger off and lo and behold you feel even worse. Collabs with big brands are supposed to be beneficial, aren’t they?

Yesterday someone asked me if I had gained a lot of followers by working with Hobbii. Initially, when they were more involved in our community (hard to imagine now), they shared a lot of content and funnelled traffic to people’s personal IG accounts, meaning lots of exposure, likes, follows, shares, comments… All good. But of course, this started to slow down over time and honestly, as I mentioned, people don’t like seeing their favourite designers turn into Hobbii spam accounts. All in all, Hobbii actually damaged my IG, my brand and made me feel like a sellout. The relentless posting requirements meant that I was losing followers in droves at one point. Some of them even messaged me (I know, a bit self-entitled, but I kind of see where they were coming from now) to say they followed me to see my work, not to see an arm of Hobbii. They were right. I give myself the ick thinking about it now. Again, why didn’t I quit? I was making a lot of money through commission and able to pay my bills.

Then, one morning, everything changed.

I was sitting at my desk very early waiting to start my day job when I checked my email and saw a message from Hobbii. I was expecting the usual, pattern payments, corrections, or admin. Instead, the subject line read something along the lines of Termination of Hobbii Freelance Designer Contract. I read it, deleted it immediately in a rage, but the message itself was simple: as of the 1st of April, my collaboration with Hobbii would be terminated, with no real reason given. I had known a month or two earlier on the grapevine that redundancies were happening, but I hadn’t connected that to us, because we weren’t salaried employees. We were commission-based, meaning we only earned when people bought our patterns. So it raised the question: why terminate working with us Freelancers at all?

Why not reduce campaigns, reduce the amount of languages you translate our patterns into or, simply scale back the programme if you’re trying to save money? Maybe stop sending out ridiculously excessive bags of yarn to all and sundry? From where I was sitting, we weren’t costing them anything directly in receiving commission from our patterns, people buying our patterns were paying us, not Hobbii, and arguably we were driving product sales to their company which made it doubly insulting and infuriating.

Why stop paying us the commission we were earming from people buying our patterns? It’s costing you nothing, Hobbii.

What followed was a full emotional breakdown, starting with immediate panic about income, because even though my earnings had already declined over time, losing that stream still mattered. It has to be said, again, that we were also never given proper transparency around our sales. We could request invoices, but we were not allowed detailed breakdowns of which patterns were performing best, which made it incredibly difficult to understand what was working and what wasn’t and how sales were calculated. Myself and others raised this multiple times and were met with vague or slightly irritated responses, which eventually just became something you stop pushing back on.

Looking back, there were warning signs. Yarn quality declining. Constant product cycles with rapid discontinuations and the removal of Hobbii Plus, their paid membership, without informing designers. Small changes stacking up over time that didn’t feel significant individually, but added up in hindsight look enormous and, well, people talk. We were all talking. One of my friends stopped working with them because their new yarns were worse than the crap sold on Temu and, I quote, “had the texture and integrity of dishrags”.

Yarns were discontinued without telling us in advance, meaning that our patterns painstakingly designed using said yarns were often rendered useless with no alternatives given to help drive pattern sales after the fact (Hobbii pushes using their own yarns for patterns – understandably), again with no info sent to us or warning. You’d only find this out when manually searching yourself and finding some red text under the yarn description stating that it was getting discontinued. Then, obviously, pattern sales the following month would be way less due to your pattern being as useful as a rainshower on laundry day. Sure, customers could still buy the pattern and substitute the yarn, but most didn’t, and this had a terrible cumulative effect.

I received my final pattern revenue payment at the beginning of April, and was told that any remaining earnings would still be paid out even if under the €60 threshold, which was previously rolled over month to month. So yes, there are sour grapes. Of course there are. Most of us ex-Hobbii Designers have chatted about this fiasco and the general feeling is the same: we were kept in the dark, communication was poor, and we worked extremely hard over the years to help build their brand. A huge part of their growth came from creators producing patterns and content that directly drove sales, while not being directly paid for that labour in a traditional sense. This an appalling way to do business and a disgusting way of treating people. We worked our asses off for them and have been disrespected massively.

All of that said, and this might sound strange after everything I’ve just written, I am actually glad it has ended, especially now their latest move has been to position themselves as an AI-driven company and publicly announce plans to integrate AI into their content strategy, which they’ve posted about across LinkedIn and then dirty-deleted – what a surprise. I am going to be frank here by saying that this article probably wouldn’t have been written if they hadn’t started involving AI slop into their brand as I was afraid that this might all come across as some kind of cringeworthy, poor me exercise, but the moment I saw their LinkedIn post I knew I had to open up about them and how far they’ve fallen.

The mind honestly boggles at how money hungry and disconnected from their audience a brand can be. Getting taken over by private equity morons doesn’t help, but am I going to tell you to stop buying their products? No. Am I going to spread hate about them because of this? No. What I am going to do is be transparent (unlike them) and share the realities of what working with them was like, because that’s part of my job as a member of our fantastic community and I want to help you make informed choices.

That said, I strongly believe that AI has no place in knitting and crochet, and neither do brands who don’t care an ounce about their workers, designers or customers. As a decent human it’s important to make responsible choices about which brands you support and decide how much you care about how they treat people, and think about if you want to give money to companies who use Artifical Intelligence – something that is ripping off the creative industry, destroying people’s jobs, critical thinking skills and destroying the world we live in. If you’re part of the yarn community in any way you need to think about this and think about it seriously. Why would you want to harm us?

So, what happens now? Well, I am happily rebuilding my brand and feeling happy about what’s to come. My website is lush, I am having fun learning about SEO, only posting content on IG when I feel like it, and I have decided to only partner with smaller brands and companies I love, and never work for free. Ever.

And as for you? If you’re a fellow designer – especially a new one on the scene: hello! 💕 – make sure that your first priority is ALWAYS about YOURSELF, your happiness, comfort and what your small business represents. Build yourself up first and then work with brands that you resonate with, and don’t be scared of saying no if things don’t sit right with you. Follow your gut, don’t accept unreasonable offers or behaviour (no matter who the brand is or how many followers they have – it means nothing) and be open about your worth. I wish I had followed my instincts with Hobbii when things turned sour and hadn’t been so willfully ignorant, but life is about learning and making better choices.

Feel free to share your own experiences with me in the comments or send a cheeky DM – I’d love to hear from you, mean it.

Have a crafty day,