Most new authors are desperate to find a literary agent and through them a publisher, but when Kate Davies completed her book Handywoman she decided to “make it herself” as well as write it herself. Accordingly, Ms Davies, the woman behind independent publishing and knitwear design company Kate Davies Designs (KDD), launched Makadu, a new book imprint specialising in narrative non-fiction, and Handywoman, which tells the story of how she found a new creative path after being paralysed by a stroke at the age of 36, is published by Makadu on 6 August.
The Makadu imprint is the latest spoke in the creative wheel that is KDD, and the business now comprises knitting patterns, yarn, knitting books and knitwear. Launched in the summer of 2010, months after Ms Davies suffered the stroke that ended her career as an academic, KDD began as an online purveyor of knitting patterns and was born out of necessity.
“I had six months of sick pay and had to think of something to do,” says Ms Davies. “When I came home that summer I put any energy I wasn’t spending on recovery into developing PDF digital download patterns.”
A keen hobby knitter, Ms Davies had been making up her own designs on an ad basis, but it had never occurred to her that it could be a business idea. Now it had to be. Two things worked in her favour. First, she had zero overheads. Second, the timing was right.
“At that point the market for internet knitting was just really burgeoning, and I thought that I could find a place in it,” she says.
Find a place she did. Her patterns now sell in over 80 countries through the knit and crochet community Ravelry.com. By 2011, she was making a profit from downloaded knitting patterns, and the following year, she reinvested all the profit that she wasn’t using to support herself to extend the business into a small publisher.
KDD’s first book, Colours of Shetland, combines 10 original knitting patterns with a journey through the landscape of the Shetland Isles in words and pictures. Ms Davies’ academic background meant she could handle the writing, and her husband, Tom Barr, served as photographer.
In 2015, Mr Barr joined the business full-time, giving up a career as an immunologist to retrain as a graphic designer and expand his photography skills. Ms Davies also launched her first yarn, Buachaille, in 2015. The subscription model she used for the launch facilitated Mr Barr’s full-time role and the subsequent recruitment of two further staff.
Buachaille, which is a mix of Shetland and mainland Cheviot wool and comes in a range of colours that reflect the Scottish landscape, came to market as part of a club. Members subscribed to receive a skein of each colour, a book and a pattern a week.
“That gave us a lot of security,” says Ms Davies.
Including Handywoman, KDD now sells 17 books, which it creates and designs in-house and prints at Bell & Bain in Glasgow, has three ranges of yarn and has won several business awards. Last year, it introduced knitwear, starting with snoods. Garments are this year’s task. All the knitwear is produced in Scotland, the snoods at William Lockie in the Borders and the garments at Harley of Scotland in Peterhead.
As yet, knitwear is a small part of the business, but Ms Davies expects it to expand. Increasingly, customers who can’t knit see her patterns and want to buy something. Overall, KDD is growing so quickly it’s hard to keep up, and Ms Davies envisages taking on another member of staff in the medium term.
Sales are online – the USA and Canada are KDD’s primary market – and the business couldn’t exist without the Internet. This mix of local and global continues to excite Ms Davies about the venture.
“Digital opportunities are really interesting to me,” she says. “It’s reaching a global audience from a very specific location. Scotland is an amazing forward-looking brand, and there are opportunities to take that to the world if you do it well through the right kind of visual messages.”
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