Carmen's Story, Part 5: Here we go, the final chapter…
Hello Yarn Lovers,
I had the time of my life living in Germany. It was a slightly slow start making friends but I got there in the end. I was lucky that the exchange student we had had for a year in high school was living in Stuttgart when I moved to the area. We had stayed close over the years and through him and working at Berlitz I started meeting people and making friends. It’s funny to me how without intention I ended up with a collection of international friends or locals who had spent significant time abroad. It fascinates me how people gravitate towards each other in that way.
When I was working at the engineering company in Stuttgart I met a boy and he was Scottish. He’d lived all over the world for work and when I was finished with my MBA we talked about moving elsewhere. I was pretty burnt out from working full time and doing school and it had been a tough and exhausting 18 months. I left my job in June 2011 and we moved to Ireland in the Spring of 2012. There had been options to go to Saudi or Australia as well but we decided Ireland was where we wanted to be. I was sure that given my work experience at that point and my shiny new masters degree and it being a country that spoke English I’d have a pretty easy time finding a new gig.
This could not have been farther from the truth. First of all, I hadn’t ever really gotten a job through a traditional ‘send in your CV and cover letter’ approach and second, the Irish economy had taken a much bigger hit in the financial crisis than Germany had, which I hadn’t really realised at all. This meant I was applying for jobs and even getting some interest but when we started discussing a compensation package I laughed most of the time. I was getting offers for less than half of what I had been earning in Germany and me and my ego were not in a position to say yes to this.
We lived in a giant house in the countryside because it cost less than the apartment had in Stuttgart. It was a beautiful house on a half acre of land with horses in the field next door, sometimes I’d go chat with them during the day and take them an apple. It was isolating in that big house though. It took me a good three months to get internet hooked up so all of my job applying was happening at the Starbucks in a shopping mall about 30 mins away. I spent a lot of time by myself for the first time in my life. I didn’t know anyone there and without a job or other anchor point it was tricky to meet people. We did a lot with his colleagues from work but it was project life for them - most of them flew in on a Monday, stayed 10 days, then flew back home.
I was finding Ireland difficult. I wasn’t good at not having anything to do and I was just getting rejected for job after job after job. I watched a lot of TV which at first was great because I caught up on all sorts of US TV shows I hadn’t watched for the six years I had been in Germany. I was bored out of my skull and not dealing well at all.
My Mom came to visit in the Autumn and one day she asked if we could find a yarn shop because ‘wasn’t there nice Irish wool here?’ So I googled yarn shops near us and we ended up at This is Knit in Dublin city centre. I had been in the building they are located in a dozen times but had never noticed the yarn shop there. Mom started chatting with the owners (Jacqui and Lisa) and I was slightly indifferent to the excursion initially but then I saw a scarf folded on a shelf that was cute and I thought to myself ‘I could make that.’ I thought it would be cute on bigger needles, with chunkier yarn and sewn into a cowl. I happened to already own some chunky needles so I bought some Debbie Bliss yarn in an ice blue color and Lisa gave me a copy of the free pattern that went with the scarf.
We went home with our purchases and Mom reminded me how the heck you cast on and I started knitting a cowl. I don’t remember how long the project took but I do remember being grateful that Mom was there to help with some mistakes early on. I was so pleased with the finished item! I wore it out to the pub all the time and I got so many compliments on it. I wanted another project! I went back to This is Knit and end up taking a couple of classes on how to knit in the round, sock knitting and fair isle. I was hooked. Like really, really hooked. I was spending all my time on Ravelry and I joined a KAL for the Veera Valimaki’s Color Affection shawl. I was the customer that hung out for too long in the yarn shop just because I liked it. Thankfully Lisa and Jacqui and their team are the friendliest, warmest and most welcoming shop keepers on the planet. I love them.
I did end up finding a temporary job that winter. I was hired to do some project management at Cuisine de France, they were looking to implement some new corporate policies after an acquisition of other companies in mainland Europe. This ended up being the most ridiculous job I ever had. It quickly became clear that I was more qualified and had more experience than those that I was working for and that was threatening to them. There was a day that I spent printing out e-mails, hole punching them and filing them in a binder because the HR Director didn’t like the online filing system. This felt like rock bottom on the work front. I was there for three months and they didn’t offer to renew my contract and I wouldn’t have said yes anyways.
We now had another choice to make due to my boyfriend’s job - he was to travel more for work so we could stay in Ireland or move to the company’s headquarters in England. We both thought I’d have a better chance of finding a job in the UK, so in the Spring of 2013 we moved here. I fell in love with Bath so that is where we settled, close enough to his work and on a train line directly into London. I assumed I’d find a job at a larger international company in the city and just commute.
Hey you guessed it, couldn’t find a job. Couldn’t even get an interview. I was told on the phone by recruiting agencies time and time again that I “didn’t have any UK experience” and that that was a problem. I applied for entry level things, things I actually wanted, I sent my CV to be professionally written by an agency that knew what hiring managers were looking for the in UK. Nothing helped. At this point I had essentially been unemployed for three years and that wasn’t helping either… I even applied for a part time maternity cover role at a local yarn shop and didn’t even get an e-mail back.
I ended up going through four rounds of interviews with Accenture in early 2014 only to be rejected after the final interview. That was the day I lost it. I’m pretty sure I threw something across the room. Being rejected over and over and over again really takes its toll on you. I was so frustrated and so unhappy. We had also been looking at getting a dog and had wanted to rescue a husky. That same day I was rejected by a second husky rescue organisation because our fence wasn’t tall enough. That was it, it was the final straw - I could not continue down this path, it was time to make things happen for myself.
I had been pondering my own business since the entrepreneurial project we had done in my MBA but I just didn’t have much of an idea. By this point though I was an avid and obsessed knitter and I missed This is Knit, I hadn’t found anything as lovely around here. So I decided to open a yarn shop. It was that simple. I pulled my CV off of every job website it was on and I found a litter of pure bred Irish Setter puppies that had just been born here in Bath. I called immediately and enquired about a puppy and visited the litter two days later. Peaches was only 4 weeks old.
I started writing my business plan. Researching the market, whose yarn I wanted to stock etc. We had a trip back to Ireland planned and I reached out to This is Knit and asked if I could possibly pick their brains about running a yarn shop and Jacqui kindly agreed to sit down with me. I filled pages of my notebook with what she said. It would have taken me a lot longer to figure things out had it not been for that meeting. I still refer back to my notes from that day sometimes.
I agreed to help my sister move from Montana to Colorado in early summer but upon my return I picked up an 11 week old Peaches from the breeder and then we spent the summer finalising my business plan. Finding a space in Bath was super tricky and it was all looking like the planning had been for not. Then we discovered a space just outside Bath that was being turned into a fancy farmshop/retail space. They had one unit available and it was dirt cheap, I’ll take it!
On November 1, 2014 I opened the doors to A Yarn Story at The Shed on Box Road just outside of Bath. That first month I did £1225.59 in total sales. Not quite the runaway hit I was hoping to be but it was a start. It is now nearly eight years later and a lot has changed. We moved spaces, the team has grown, the business has expanded and I have the most remarkable community supporting me and my dreams.
And that my friends is the full story of how a girl from Eugene, Oregon ended up running a yarn shop in Bath, England.
I feel like this is what I was supposed to do all along. Had I not stopped crafting and making for so long or had I thought about it sooner, then maybe I would have realised earlier that this is where I should be. Or maybe not. I probably needed to feel as lost and unhappy as I did to fully understand the power of knitting, to see that it’s about so much more than sticks and string, it’s about connecting with ourselves and those around us. It is by no means always easy running a small business, it has been both incredibly humbling and also the most fun I’ve ever had.
If you've made it through every Blog, thank you so much for reading. Thank you for shopping with us and supporting us in all the ways you do, I feel incredibly blessed that I get to run a yarn shop everyday.
Carmen's Story
Part 1: Let's Start at the Beginning
Part 2: You're Tall - You Should Play Sports