Hard Truths: Designer Exploitation is Baked into the Knitting Industry

I recently observed a public battle between a yarn company and a designer over the rights to (and earnings from) one of that designer’s patterns, and was quickly reminded of an often overlooked fact that shapes our industry today: the exploitation of designers has been one of the foundations of the modern knitting industry.

And the rise of independent designers has ultimately been able to make little progress in fighting it.

Once upon a time, you learned to knit as a child, from your mother or grandmother, and what you learned wasn’t just the stitches to create fabric, but the process of creating hats and mittens and sweaters and socks. Patterns weren’t much of A Thing—both because instructions weren’t necessary and because knitting was primarily utilitarian. (That’s not to say knitters didn’t jazz their work up with colorwork patterns and cables and other decorative elements; it wasn’t, however, the primary point of knitting.)

Knitting today is very different. Almost none of us have to knit to keep ourselves and our families from freezing to death. We can buy sweaters for the price of a few balls of yarn and 6 pack of socks for even less. We knit because we want to—whether as an alternative to the fast fashion industry or simply because we enjoy it. And, generally speaking, we also want to have to cute stuff that fits well.

As knitting made this transition from necessity to hobby, the transfer of knitting knowledge to younger generations faltered. Your great-great-grandmother could perhaps knit a whole sweater, without a pattern; your mom, maybe a scarf. And you likely were taught nothing at all until you asked to learn. So we’ve gone from every generation learning all the ins-and-outs of knitting to recent generations learning the bare essentials at most. And in turn, we’ve gone from patterns being basically non-existent, to being a general outline (remember “reverse shaping for opposite side”? :shudder:), to being a detailed and comprehensive instruction manual, all to meet the evolving needs and desires of knitters.

What hasn’t changed much, however, is how little patterns are valued, despite the increasing need for them, as well as the ever-growing amount of work that goes into them. Patterns have long been treated as an afterthought within the industry—a gimmick whose purpose is to sell yarn, the “real” product—and as such, designers have often been treated the same way.

I don’t want to speak for anyone else, so I’ll give you a few examples of my own.

The very first pattern I sold was to a yarn company. I’d been designing for maybe a year, so not only was I very excited to have a design accepted for publication, I also had zero experience and no position to advocate from. As such, I accepted their terms without giving it much thought—they paid me $75 and held onto the rights to the pattern for THREE YEARS. During that 3 year period, I was supposed to earn royalties—but they would only be paid out once they totaled $100. I never got a penny. My sample was never returned to me either—they lost it (if that doesn’t say “we don’t care about your work,” I don’t know what does).
Had I published that design independently, I would’ve only had to sell 12 copies to earn my payment—and I would’ve had the sample too.

Sale number 2 was later that same year, so I still had very little experience. This time it was a sweater, to a small yarn company, managed by a larger distributer that was overseeing the production of a collection. This time I was paid $375—which seemed like a lot—for them to keep the rights . . . IN PERPETUITY. That means I never get the rights back. Ever. The pattern is theirs forever, I can never republish it, the sample was never returned to me, I earn no royalties. They wouldn’t even send me a final copy of the pattern.
As it turns out, selling rights to something in perpetuity is a Bad Idea—for any amount of money, let alone for what amounted to about $10/hour—and due largely to designer advocacy it’s now rarely even requested in the industry.
But I didn’t know better.

And far too many bad (or simply ignorant) actors in our industry bank on just that. They hope you don’t know better and they prey on inexperienced designers who are eager to try to make a career out of something they enjoy and they exploit the “nice” knitters who obviously just want to earn some pocket change because designing is its own reward. Or something.

Did I have a responsibility to educate, and advocate for, myself? Yes. But unlike my concurrent industry, translation—where information about market rates and contract terms and numerous trade organizations exist—pattern design had, at the time (and still today, if I’m being honest), almost nothing in the way of industry data or business networking opportunities. Even TNNA, the now-defunct needle arts trade association, had no membership option for designers or any content geared toward us until just a couple of years before they went bust.

How could the fiber arts industry’s only trade organization have nothing for pattern designers?
Because patterns continue to be an afterthought—a non-essential created by hobbyists for a little extra cash, not a central part of the industry, which exists to sell you yarn and other knitting-related gadgets and doodads (and to create new knitters who will, in turn, buy more yarn and doodads).

Much of the difficulty, I believe, stems from the fact that patterns cannot be marketed in the same way as yarn, because patterns aren’t consumable. Once you use your yarn to create something, it’s gone; you now have The Thing, but you no longer have usable yarn. If you want to continue knitting, you have to buy more yarn.
Patterns, on the other hand, can be used endlessly; their value doesn’t diminish with use. You can use a single pattern an infinite number of times. A pattern is just as usable the day you buy it as it is 10 years later (fashion trends notwithstanding)—it doesn’t get used up, wear out, break, or fail. You can (but, really, shouldn’t) share patterns with friends, or borrow them from the library, hand them down to the next generation—multiple people can use a single pattern over the years and the pattern remains as it ever was.
All of this should be an argument for charging MORE for patterns. But instead, it seems to be a justification for devaluing them—and their creators—because they don’t fit neatly into the consumption economy we currently exist in.

Every time I open my email and see a message from a knitting magazine announcing “Pattern sale, all patterns $2!”, my heart drops. A sale is one thing; devaluing someone’s work to the point that you’re basically giving it away for free is another. It does very real damage to the industry when its leaders contact thousands of knitters to basically announce that patterns are worth about as much change as you can dig out of your couch cushions. Especially magazines that were presumably created for patterns.
(Or were they? Is the end goal of knitting magazines to showcase designers’ work while making unique knitting patterns accessible to knitters around the globe—or is it to provide a print forum for yarn companies’ advertising? Hmmm…)

Indie designers have brought some much needed change to the industry, enabled largely by the digital landscape we now operate in. Patterns can be sold independently, designers can set their prices, and in refusing to work for pittance wages have pushed many magazines and companies to increase their design fees and offer better terms. On the other hand, this has also created a more competitive design field where designers push (or are pushed) to add more value to their patterns as a way to stand out, while still working within a larger industry that perpetuates the belief that patterns should be cheap or free (not to mention the 90s-era holdover belief that pretty much everything on The Internet should be available free-of-charge; see also: journalism).

But designers advocating for themselves has done little to change the fiber arts industry’s end goal—to sell consumable products and services. We can talk until we’re blue in the face about how much work, how many hours, how many dollars go into pattern production. But when the entire industry is structured around patterns being a loss leader, rather than a product in and of themselves, it largely falls on deaf ears, and conditions remain ripe for designer exploitation.