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Alright, here's my attempt at rewriting the passage:
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Hey everyone,
First off, I want to own up to something. I've been neglecting to share something important with you all. At the end of last year, we asked you to take a survey for us, and over 1,500 of you responded. Thank you so much for taking the time to participate! I owe you an apology because I haven't yet shared what we learned from your feedback. Today, I'm finally going to address that.
You guys gave us some really thoughtful feedback, and we took it seriously. During January, we analyzed your responses and put together a plan to address the concerns and suggestions you shared. I wish I could say we're going to implement every single suggestion, but that's just not feasible. I'll probably talk more about that in a later post. For now, I want to focus on one particular topic that sparked a lot of discussion: paper versus digital patterns.
This is a topic that every sewer seems to have an opinion on. Some love the convenience of digital patterns – instant downloads, no shipping costs, easy to store. Others aren't thrilled about the idea of printing and assembling patterns at home. Often, the loudest voices tend to dominate the conversation, so I wanted to share what we discovered after listening to over 1,500 dedicated sewists and analyzing our sales data. The results were eye-opening for us, and based on what we learned, we're making some changes that you'll start seeing next week.
Before we dive into that, I think it's worth setting the stage a bit. Oliver + S hasn't been around for very long compared to the broader history of sewing patterns. Ebenezer Butterick invented the first commercial sewing pattern back in 1863. (I hope he'd approve of the Lisette patterns his company produces today!) But over the last decade or so, we've witnessed one of the biggest shifts in how this industry operates since its inception.
When Liesl launched Oliver + S in 2008, patterns were still being printed, sold to retailers, and distributed to consumers via fabric stores. We had a website back then, but it wasn't a significant source of sales. Things started to change in October 2011. Retailers were buying fewer patterns to stock, and we noticed that some of our out-of-print patterns were still in high demand. So we decided to experiment with offering some patterns digitally. We came up with a unique way to convert these patterns into PDFs and posted them online. Sales started slow, but gradually picked up. By the end of 2011, we'd sold 382 digital patterns, which wasn't enough to justify reprinting any individual style, but it showed there might be enough interest to expand further.
Fast forward three years to 2014. 78% of our product sales revenue came from online purchases. Of all the orders placed on our site that year, 63% were for digital patterns only, and even more orders included both digital and physical patterns. Overall, 50% of our product sales revenue came from digital patterns alone.
Let me break down what these numbers mean. First, the primary sales channel has shifted from local fabric stores to the internet. Second, people buying patterns online clearly prefer digital formats over paper. These are two huge changes in how this industry has functioned since its creation over a century and a half ago. And these shifts happened incredibly quickly.
Your survey responses reinforced these trends. About 30% of respondents strongly prefer digital patterns, while 26% don't have a strong preference between paper and digital. That means over half of our customers are comfortable using digital patterns. What's more, 70% of respondents said they wouldn't hesitate to buy a pattern if it were only available digitally (compared to 16% who said they definitely wouldn't).
What does this mean for us? Our business model has transitioned from a B2B approach to a B2C model, and digital patterns have grown to be a major part of our business. This trend is only going to accelerate—so much so that we expect digital pattern sales to surpass paper sales for the first time this year. Naturally, this means paper pattern sales and sales to retailers will continue to decline. However, there are still plenty of retailers and individual sewists who prefer paper patterns when they're available.
This presents a tricky situation for us. Like most businesses, we have limited resources to allocate, and we need to invest them wisely to meet both short-term needs and long-term goals. Historically, the bulk of our resources have gone toward product development. Creating new patterns is expensive, but it's essential for staying competitive. After that, our next priority has been printing and warehousing paper patterns. In the past, we could reliably estimate how many copies of a pattern we'd sell in the first 9-12 months after launch. We'd print that amount, warehouse them, and ship them out. When they sold out, we'd decide whether to reprint based on ongoing demand. Older patterns typically went through multiple reprints before we decided to discontinue them.
But things have changed dramatically due to the rise of digital patterns. Now, instead of printing multiple runs, we typically print a pattern just once and adjust our initial print run size to better match demand. We still sell through our entire print run eventually, but it takes much longer now, and we rarely reprint. This makes our inventory less efficient over time, tying up more capital in stagnant stock and increasing our warehouse costs as we need more space to store items that linger longer.
On one hand, eliminating paper patterns altogether would simplify things for us. We'd free up more capital to invest elsewhere, avoid the hassle of managing print runs, and eliminate the need for a warehouse full of patterns. (Did you know it costs us about ten cents per year to store a single pattern? Multiply that by the number of patterns we have, and it adds up quickly!) On the other hand, going fully digital right now wouldn't be the right move either. Despite the decline, there are still retailers and consumers who want paper patterns, and we want to continue offering what they need.
So here's what we're doing in response to your feedback. Starting next week, the new Oliver + S patterns will be available in both paper and digital formats. Additionally, we're investing in producing the next Liesl + Co. collection for women in paper format—a first for us.
Now, this might sound contradictory given what I just explained. Why produce two new paper collections when digital is clearly the preferred format? Well, we listened to you, and we've always aimed to do what's best for our industry and customers. For example, we keep releasing patterns for boys' clothing, even though they don't sell as well as girls' dresses. Why? Because we know many of you have boys you want to sew for. It's not the most profitable choice, but it's what you've told us you want.
Producing two new paper collections isn't the most efficient use of our resources, but we're moving forward anyway. We're doing this mainly for retailers who want to carry our patterns and for those of you who have expressed a preference for paper. We'll keep offering paper patterns as long as both retailers and consumers continue to buy them. So, if you're a retailer or someone who consistently prefers paper patterns, we're counting on you to support us by purchasing a few. Honestly, if I look ahead, I don't see paper patterns sticking around for another 20 years. How long we continue producing them depends on how long enough of you who like them keep buying them at levels that justify production.
For those of you who prefer digital patterns, we also listened to your feedback. The new Oliver + S patterns coming out next week include several changes directly inspired by your requests:
- All patterns will now include A0-sized pages for international users whose print shops use this format.
- Pages will be consecutively numbered to make navigation easier and ensure nothing gets missed during printing.
- A guide will be included at the beginning to help you identify which pages correspond to each view in the pattern, allowing you to print only what you need.
- New trimming lines will be added to make it easier to prepare the pattern pieces before assembly.
Many of you asked for layered PDF files that let you print only the sizes you need. While Yuki from Waffle Patterns does this beautifully, creating layered PDFs requires starting the design process earlier than we did for this season's patterns. As a result, this feature won't be included this time around, but we're committed to producing future styles as layered PDFs.
That's all for now. I know this was a lot of information, but I really appreciate the time and thought so many of you put into completing our survey. We take your feedback seriously, and I hope this gives you a glimpse into how we're putting it into action.
This post breaks every rule we have for Oliver + S blog posts—it's too long, focused on us rather than you, and lacks inspirational photos. But since I wrote the rules, I figure I get a pass occasionally. If you've made it this far and found this interesting, please leave a comment to let me know. If I can tell that people are actually reading this and appreciating it, I might write a couple more posts exploring other aspects of our survey and the changes we're making based on your input.
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I hope this version feels more conversational and human-written! Let me know if you'd like any further tweaks.