For the retailers, it's all about what's new. Tom Coghlan, who is now Executive VP of Wal-Mart and I were once having dinner. I said, "Tom, what can we do to get our yarn up by the register." He laughed, and said, "Why don't we use the people greeters?" Well, that fall, every one of Wal-Mart's people greeters was wearing a scarf made with our Homespun yarn and a button that said "Ask me about my scarf." We had a 68% sales increase in eight weeks.
In 1998 they made me head of the Craft Yarn Council, our trade association. I told them my job would be to spend their money. They had $250,000 in the bank. It wasn't enough for advertising, but I knew we had to do something to make knitting cool. The boom was starting, but it hadn't hit the media. So I hired a public relations woman named Alice Fixx.
There's no one like Alice. She got us into InStyle magazine. But the biggest breakthrough was a three-quarter page story in Time. It established the knitting phenomenon.
I also came up with the idea of the Knit-Out, to get knitting out into the streets. We had our first one in 1998 and 1,000 people came to Lincoln Center. This year we had over 20,000 in Union Square in Manhattan. It's a yarn carnival. I want it to be as big as the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
A couple of years ago I met Milton Glaser in Woodstock, New York. I asked him if he would work with us, and he agreed. He does our packaging, our advertising, and works on keeping our brand fresh and contemporary.
We also do custom publishing. It's a way for us to control our message. Last year we put out a new publication called Knit.1 for the 18-25 group. It's a little edgier. It's distributed at retail, and you can buy it at Barnes & Noble.
We're making a big push on the Internet. Over a million patterns have been downloaded from our site; we had 900,000 unique visitors last year. We have a Lion Brand gallery where people can share their results. And we created a Lion Brand boutique, like eBay, where you can sell your product.
I never doubted that there would be a resurgence of knitting. But I never expected this. People like Sarah Jessica Parker and Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz are knitting. There's a popular book called Stitch and Bitch that's getting young women to knit again. I still remember when knitting was something your grandmother did. If I went to a cocktail party and could find one person who knitted, I felt great.
There's even a book called Knitting Into the Mystery: A Guide to the Shawl Knitting Ministry about the spiritual part of knitting. We'll be offering it through out catalog. We deal with hundreds of knitting ministries. The craft is everywhere.
Mario Andretti says if you're in control you're not going fast enough. I'm not in control anymore. Things have changed so tremendously in the last two years. I had a dream of being a $50 million company. Meanwhile we did around $150 million in 2004, more than a 30% increase over 2003, which was a 40% increase over the year before. We're looking to be a $200 million company by the end of 2005. We're getting another 50 SKUs at Wal-Mart this year. Amazing.
Someone asked me how we didn't implode. Last year I went to shul and said Kaddish for my father almost every day. It gave me time to think and reflect about how he would do things during this enormous growth period. We have functioning teams working here: It's not just family. And everyone is charged up.
The experts we brought in have helped us tremendously. We have a great accountant who deals with family businesses, and other wonderful outside advisors. One of them once told us that a family tree is not an organization chart. Our banks have been great; we have a fabulous relationship with JP Morgan Chase that goes back more than 70 years.
We are dealing with passionate consumers -- these are people who are not buying a finished product. It gives them tremendous satisfaction. They celebrate life with our yarn: birthdays, the arrival of children. We get love letters from them.
I want to get medical research done about how knitting calms people down, but it takes a lot of bucks to fund, and many years. Teachers around the country are finding they give 5th,6th and 7th graders knitting and it calms them down. It's better than Ritalin.
In the future, I'd like to do a flagship store, but we're just too busy this year. We have a model that Milton created. We want to show our retailers about how to romance and merchandise the category.
My son is doing a great job. His supervisor wants to give him a bonus, and I said don't do it because he's my son. He's the fifth generation. The sixth is in the business, too. He's Dean's grandson, and he's on a label of yarn.
There is something inside that makes us want to knit. I remember my wife was pregnant with my middle guy, and she was lying on the beach and said, "David, you'll never guess what I feel like doing now. I feel like crocheting." I said, "Wait till you get home, I'm not buying retail."
