The Caucasknitty of these bros

Guys, I’m so mad. I’m seeing red, and I don’t have anywhere to put my rage so I’m going to interrupt your regularly scheduled Geek-A-Long post with a special assignment. I need you to help me smash the patriarchy. It’s hard to keep up with all the happenings on the kniternet, things move quickly and I miss stuff a lot. I’m a little late to this rage party. I heard about it when Space Cadet released a new colorway “mansplain it to me” which is magnificent. Buy some. She’s a really cool chick who we’ve met a few times, and I hope she sells out of that color.

Anyhow, I saw her mention of the controversy on instagram and fell down a Reddit hole about the whole thing, and I’ve been a little ball of rage since then. It’s all I can think about. So please forgive what is about to be an incredibly long post because I need you to know about this nonsense. I need everyone to know. This is a one off, we’ll be back here next Sunday with the scheduled theme reveal and a secret project we’ve had in the works for this year’s GAL. I promise double the Geek-A-Long-Goodness next week. But today, we NEED to talk about the poster boys for toxic capitalism at EcomCrew that think you are sitting at home right now, just desperately pining for them to come mansplain knitting.

These dudebros have effed around with the knitting community, and over the last few weeks, they have been finding out. Mike Jackness and Dave Bryant run “the world’s most transparent podcast”.  Their big claim to fame is that they started an adult coloring business that they claim sold for millions of dollars. I’m skeptical, but whatever. Maybe they did. That did not however, prepare them to “disrupt the knitting industry”. These smarmy, patronizing, mediocre white men have purchased the domain Knitting.com and they are really excited to tell you about what geniuses they are. Here is why you should care:

1. They are proud to tell you that the best business model is one where you can push a lot of product and make lots of money per click. The result is those spammy click bait websites and low quality products. Big box knitting supplies are already a thing. We don’t actually have a market void there. We don’t need them to make a click-bait version of Michales.com. I don’t have a problem with big boxes (not counting Hobby Lobby. Don’t shop there). I am an indie dyer and designer, but I also recognize that expensive Indie yarn isn’t right for every project, or budget, or taste. No judgies. I want you to find joy in knitting no matter what yarn you are using. And that’s the big thing here. These dudes absolutely don’t care about your joy. I can say this with total certainty because they haven’t bothered to learn ANYTHING about you.
2. If you don’t read the rest of this, here’s what you need to know: They believe that what the knitting industry is really missing, the thing that they can bring in and carve out a name for themselves, is WHITNESS. The unchecked privilege and colonialism and that they manage to pack into a 40 minute podcast is staggering.
3. I mentioned in the first point that they don’t know anything about you. They also think very little of you. They actively look down on the “loony” “unsophisticated granny” that they believe is the bulk of the world’s knitting content creators. And I’m mad. How fracking dare they. We are an incredibly robust and diverse community of creators and they can just go suck a knob.
4. They don’t say this outright in the podcast, but I have met this breed of bro in the wild enough to know the real business model here: Stealing content from small businesses to repost and profit off of. Do you know how I know that? Because as non-knitters who plan to launch an “incredibly profitable content based company” that’s the only way they possibly could be going. They will use algorithms to steal highly searched content and repost it, and then link the unsuspecting customer to their uninspired selection of off-brand knitting stuff, and the customer often buys thinking they are supporting the artist who’s content they just consumed. It’s not a new business model, and despite what they clearly think, they haven’t broken any new ground here. It’s insidious, but not inspired.

Review them into obscurity

I want you to tell every knitter you know. Drag their stupid 80k domain name through the mud where it belongs so that someone doesn’t get tricked into paying them for content that will almost certainly have been stolen. Review them on iTunes. Review them everywhere. They posted this podcast on Valentine’s day and have been surprised to find out that all those unsophisticated grannies they were so disparaging of are actually quite adept with internet comments. They took down the blog post and the front (only) page at knitting.com currently reads as a non-apology saying they want current industry professionals to “partner” with them. They responded to a few comments acting like now they are interested to hear what the industry wants. Don’t give them the time of day or the clicks. Don’t get sucked into their pleas for partners, and don’t let them profit from your thoughts. They haven’t earned a redemption arc.

r\crafsnark has a great recap, and with credit given to them for having done this first, I’m going to take you on a walk through this absurdity. Dawlface covered it well, but I keyed in on a few things that I think will be especially relevant to the L&L reader.

Mike and Dave took down the blog post and the podcast from their website, but the internet is forever. It’s still available on iTunes. Behold:

2:20– Mike notes that there is a lot to unpack here. I couldn’t agree more. He says “niche” constantly, but he pronounces it “nitch” (rhymes with litch) and it’s like nails on a chalkboard.

3:30-Calls himself young and arrogant. Manages to do so without a single trace of self-awareness.

4:45– “We’ve ended up in the Knitting Nitch.” I’m dying. Why doesn’t anyone tell him it’s not pronounced that way. This man has no friends. Dave steps in to compare it to boating and then running shoes. Neither analogy gets where he was trying to take it.

5:50-10:00 Mostly filler, and they desperately want you to know that they run 7 figure businesses. They casually reference the “loonies” currently invested in the knitting community. I assume Loony=brown people, women, or looniest of all: brown women.

10:15– “We’ve bought the domain name, so that’s done.” Because clearly becoming the massive success they think they are about to be in the knitting world is 90% owning the right domain name.

10:30– More filler. Mike teases the “secret sauce” sessions he’s going to offer about his pending rise to Knitting Superstardom.

11:35– Claims to have started trying to buy the domain in 2019. Did not once consider that maybe he should try knitting in the 3 years that followed.

12:00– Mike rambles about what made him want to take over and disrupt the knitting industry. Mostly that it’s a “consumable product”. You use “knitting yarn”, and where could people possibly get that other than from him?! There are tools and people just “use them up”. He notes that people have an “insatiable appetite for their craft”. Does he think needles are single use? Like, there is a market for needles, clearly, but….does he think that there is a market VOID there?

12:30– Knitters are constantly looking for more widgets. I honestly have no idea what that even means. Does he mean apps? There is a space for really good knitting apps, actually. I don’t think that’s what he means though. I think maybe he means notions?

Right around the 14 minute mark it goes completely off the rails

It’s the dream. You have something that gets searched a lot, and the internet has been around for 20+ years, and people have written a lot, but it’s still relatively low competition because it does take some additional work and knowledge to be able to put out really good content. So I think that there’s an opportunity for us to really execute on that part and create some of the best content in the knitting space.

-Dudebro Dave

15:25– I can literally FEEL them nodding to each other in a “Yes, my brofessor” vibe. They think they have really innovated here. They have literally invented the idea of making knitting tutorials.

You also talked about competition, and that’s really important to me as well. So you go onto Amazon and it is LITTERED with Chinese competitors who have fairly optimized listings. There’s a lot of categories on Amazon where people hate to admit it but Chinese sellers actually do a really good job with their listings. Now for knitting – and hopefully there’s no one from China listening right now – but they all do a terrible job, and it’s 2 factors. So number 1, I don’t think knitting is a big deal in China, like, a lot of the Asians. You know as we’re discovering as we try to do the A’s for our new company*; also creating the content and the imagery and the videos for a knitting brand as somebody based in China is a little bit tricky. Because, as we all know, you can’t really have Chinese models in your videos. You know, there’s a bias towards having Western models in videos.

-Dudebro Mike

YES BRO, THERE *IS* A BIAS. THANK YOU FOR NOTICING. Oh, what’s that? Oh, you didn’t mean YOUR biases. Got it.  

And having those Western models in content. It’s a lot harder to do if you’re a Chinese seller. So that was certainly one of the big pros I see going into this niche. In terms of competition off of Amazon in developing content, I think the content creation landscape fits into one of 2 categories: there’s the very very high quality competitors that probably number in the low dozen, maybe even under 10, and these are Big Mammoth Companies who do a pretty good job with their content. And everyone else is like, Grandma who has a little blog that she’s run for the last 20 years, and she puts up a piece of content every few weeks or every few months, and pretty unsophisticated competitors. There’s this big chasm (pronounced “chah-sum” which make me physically cringe) where there’s these big guys and these small guys, and there is really no one in between, like a medium sized company doing a good job with content. So that’s a big opportunity in terms of competition. We can be that middle guy that’s a little more nimble and put out content that’s a little more approachable than the big guys and also better than granny who’s had her blog for the last 20 years.

-Dudebro Mike

Let’s be really clear about what “approachable” means. He means WHITE.

I guess I’m an unsophisticated grandma. I guess we all are. And let me be crystal-fracking-clear here, I know some VERY sophisticated knitting creators who are also older. I am not suggesting that there is a relationship between being “sophisticated” and being a grandma, and I’m not going to participate in ageism. I have a lot to say about ageism in the industry but frankly I’m 17 min into this podcast and am approaching my 3^rd single spaced page of commentary so I’ll save that for another day. But good job bro, get started in this industry by trotting out the world’s most tired knitting stereotype.

17:20– They start rambling about how their site will get “hundreds of thousands of visitors per month” that they can feed right into their Amazon stores where they will be literally the only people selling knitting stuff. They expect to get $80,000 per month in sales.

I can’t reiterate this enough: They know so little about knitting and knitting products that they repeatedly reference “knitting yarn” as if it’s specially formulated for knitting. Like, the person at the counter at Joanns is going to stop you before you purchase that yarn to make sure you know it’s JUST FOR KNITTING. And what if you buy non-knitting yarn and try to knit with it?! You’ll probably cause some sort of rip in the space time continuum.

19:30-25:00 Boring men ramble boringly about boring things. They say “black hat and white hat” a lot, and I think they imagine they sound super smart. They mostly talk about why it was genius of them to have spent 80k for their domain. Apparently having the domain name makes them SUPER LEGIT. No one will ever question them.

They need you to know they spent 80k. This will be on the final.

25:20- “There will only ever be 1 knitting.com”. No one tell them about Ravelry, Lovecrafts, WEBS, Craftsy, Etsy, r\knitting, Jimmy Beans, Knitgrammer, Instagram, etc…

28:35– “I hope to sell this business one day for 8 figures.” Oh, my sweet summer bro, you adorable little flower. This domain is going to be worth about 80 cents when you’re done with it.

I think we’re in a really good spot. We have the knowledge to really execute here.

-Dudebro Mike

WHAT KNOWLEDGE MY DUDE? What knowledge do you have? Because it’s not knowledge of the industry, products, competition, or community.

30:00– They are SHOCKED that people are buying their knitting-yarn from places other than Amazon. They believe that they are some sort of internet sleuthing experts for having uncovered the existence of websites other than Amazon for buying yarn. Excuse me. I meant knitting yarn. Presumably you can buy other kinds on Amazon. They will sell you their incredible business sleuthing secrets for the low low price of $Free.99.

The rest of the show is just them saying “secret sauce” over and over and trying to sell you on the premise that they are the greatest business gurus that have ever graced the earth with their otherworldly magnificence, and would you like to pay them for the privilege of more of this incredible content.

That was the longest 39 minutes of my life. As of right now the unsophisticated granny squad has claimed the facebook, Instagram, and tiktok handles for knitting.com and I couldn’t be happier. I hope that Mike and Dave feel bad. They should feel bad about what they’ve done here. Let’s make sure they keep feeling bad and don’t get to fade away for a bit and then sneak back into our spaces and rip off the actual artist and small business owners that make up our community.

Go get ‘em.

~Megan-Anne

*LOL, I don’t know what “do the A’s” means either, but I think we can go ahead and assume it’s racist.