With an annual income of 7 figures, the couple successfully started a business with a niche category!

Go deep into the niche market and turn the niche into the mainstream.

With a needle and a few balls of thread, cute dolls and gorgeous flowers are created with the light movements of fingers. Overseas, crochet, a relaxing and stress-relieving handicraft activity, is becoming more and more popular among young people.

On TikTok, the combined views of the two topics #crochet and #knitting exceeded 100 billion. Under these topics, there are many videos with over 10 million views, and most of the participants are young male and female bloggers.

The woolen yarn, which originally cost tens of dollars, has been transformed into knitting tools sold overseas for tens of dollars, and has been made into various knitted toys by consumers. There are even couples who have successfully started a business with this humble yarn and earn seven figures a year.

Husband and wife start a business! Revenue reached 7 million US dollars in 4 years

Justine Tiu and Adrian Zhang, an Asian couple working in the financial industry, found an opportunity in crochet and switched to DIY knitting products. It took them only four years to achieve a million-dollar revenue.

In 2020, Justine, who found peace and fun in life from knitting products, decided to turn this hobby into a career. She and Adrian officially founded a brand website called "The Woobles", focusing on high-quality DIY knitting products, hoping that more people can find their own little world in the pressure and discover the beauty of life.

At that time, their first start-up capital was only US$200, which was mainly used to purchase yarn and domain names.

Unexpectedly, The Woobles attracted a lot of attention from fans as soon as it was launched on social media, especially on TikTok, where the extremely high popularity of topics related to #crochet and #knitting greatly promoted the brand of The Woobles.

Currently, The Woobles has more than 200,000 followers on TikTok, with some of its videos having over 10 million views and over 1 million likes. Many fans have left comments saying that the product is very cute and they want to buy and try DIY knitted dolls.

Since its launch, The Woobles has spent more time on users, designing kits specifically for beginners, complete with yarn, crochet hooks, stuffing, glasses, teaching tutorials, etc. The tutorials alone took a lot of time to perfect, and the videos are concise and limited to 5 minutes, allowing novices to easily get started in a short time, giving users a high experience and emotional value.

Even in the DIY knitting industry, which faces a prominent homogeneity problem, The Woobles still ranks first on Amazon's BS list with a price that is about 30-60 US dollars higher than its peers, and many of its products are on the BSR list. In addition, the sales of many of its products in the past month have been over 1K, and the sales in the following figure have even reached 6K+ and 9k+.

Some co-branded items have attracted many anime fans, such as Harry Potter, Sanrio, Barbie, etc. Some of them are even sold out, such as a Pac-Man game kit, which was sold out right after pre-sale.

As one of the important sales sources of The Woobles, more than 50% of its traffic comes from direct traffic, which shows that the brand has a certain degree of popularity in the market. As of September this year, the monthly visits to its independent website reached 2.18 million, but the user bounce rate was relatively high, exceeding 40%.

After years of development, The Woobles' total sales in 2022 have exceeded US$5.3 million. Its products have expanded from the original official website to platforms such as Amazon and Walmart. It has successfully leapt from obscurity to become a leading brand in the US DIY weaving market, with annual revenue of US$7 million.

On Amazon, when searching for crochet tools, you can find many links with very good sales and ratings. There are also some kits that include yarn, crochet hooks, pins, scissors, etc., with prices ranging from US$9 to US$40. And the sales are all good, mostly 1k, even 3K, 5K.

DIY knitting becomes popular overseas, with a surge in searches

In fact, the popularity of DIY knitting products is not limited to Amazon, independent websites and other platforms, but also on Temu. Whether it is a single product or a set, many are in a hot-selling state. It is also in line with the saying that the price is the best, and it is understood that the price on the Temu platform ranges from US$1 to US$10.

In addition, fashion shopping platform Lyst said that online searches for "knitting" and "crochet" on its platform are also increasing. On Google Trends, when searching for the words "crochet" and "knitting", it was found that the popularity of each entry has remained high, and the search volume of related topics has increased. The search volume of individual words such as "crochet pumpkin" has soared by 900%.

The increase in search frequency has injected momentum into the development of this market and attracted many sellers to join in. Crochetta is a seller registered in Shenzhen. It only started to sell crocheted suit products in 2023, but its development speed is extremely fast.

In less than a year, it has become the second-largest seller. From the product point of view, Crochetta is similar to The Woobles, both of which have brightly colored pages and multiple product packages, but the prices are mostly $9-20, which is much lower than The Woobles. In addition, Crochetta's new product launch speed and operation rhythm are extremely fast, grabbing a lot of market share, and the sales of many products are over 1K.

However, while knitted dolls are becoming increasingly popular, sellers should also be aware that some leading sellers have registered relevant copyrights, and their images are often protected by copyright. Sellers need to pay more attention when entering this market.

DIY is not only popular in knitting, but also in the tool market

Foreigners' preference for DIY shows the popularity of this market. As early as 2021, the scale of this market reached 680 billion US dollars, and it is expected to reach 1.252 trillion US dollars by 2027.

This has led to a hot sale of DIY tool products. For products such as wrenches and screwdrivers needed for outdoor gardening activities, the popularity of "Tool storage" on Google has been above 75 in recent times, and related search terms in some regions are soaring.

On TikTok , there are more than 20 million posts about #Tool Storage Ideas , most of which are overseas consumers sharing their creative tool storage videos. Many videos have received extremely high views and likes.

Take a tool belt that can hold multiple products as an example. Many bloggers shared how to use it, which gained a lot of traffic. Thanks to this, a store selling tool belts on Amazon also had good sales, with an average of more than 200 orders per day and monthly sales of 120,000 US dollars. It is mainly suitable for different scenarios such as daily home repairs and gardening.

By deeply understanding and exploring the niche needs of consumers, we will naturally be able to occupy our own place in the overseas market.

The Woobles

Crochet

DIY