By EMILEE KLEIN
Staff Writer
Barbara Elkins at Webs in Northampton, which she founded 50 years ago with Donna Singer. The company started with $3,000 in capital, which Barbara Elkins convinced her husband, Art Elkins, a Webs partner who replaced Singer eight years after opening, to take out of their savings account. PHOTO BY DAN LITTLE
When Webs opened their doors on May 16, the first day of the store’s annual tent sale, store manager Angela Cheek watched as a rush of people flowed through the doors for three whole continuous minutes on a Thursday morning. Within an hour, the checkout line stretched from the counter to the back of the store, each customer holding baskets stuffed with merchandise. It would be five hours before Cheek could find a quiet moment where she wasn’t answering questions or restocking yarn.
A palpable excitement buzzed around the store as weavers, crocheters and knitters, old and new, flocked to Webs’ yearly tent sale. Webs is known to attract visitors from around the world, as seen by the map at the front of the store with hundreds of pins representing visitors from across North America, Europe, Asia and the Pacific Islands, and this particular tent sale is especially attractive to fiber artists far and wide.
Gureda Fontin drove from Rockaway, New York, for a “knitting vacation” at the store, stocking up on supplies to further learn the craft she started six months ago. Haesoo Ji of Rhode Island didn’t enjoy knitting when she first came to Webs a decade ago in a cramped car with a bunch of her classmates from a textile class at the Rhode Island School of Design, but now she loves the tactile aspects of the craft, from the repetitive movement of the needles to feeling different varieties of yarn in the store. Rachel Shulman took the day off from her job at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to meet a friend from graduate school in Northampton, which she said was really an excuse to come by Webs and sort through the sale bins.
“If you know knitters, nobody needs more yarn. It’s just fun to come to look and think of all the projects you can do,” Shulman said.
Charlie Dellinger-Pate and her long-time friend and fellow knitter Terri Bennette untangled a soft gray yarn from the dozens of skeins thrown about in a cardboard sale bin, their hands moving in repetitive motion to straighten out, then rewrap the yarn for a continuous 40 minutes, hoping to salvage what they could for a sweater. During their work, the two reminisced on their experiences with the store that served as their yearly meeting place, halfway between New Haven, Connecticut, and central Vermont.
When Dellinger-Pate first moved four hours away from her friend, she still worked at a school in New Haven. She’d break up the grueling commute with a bathroom break. At least, that’s what she told her husband.
Gureda Fontin stands in line to pay for her yarn at Webs during the anniversary and tent sale in May. STAFF PHOTO/CAROL LOLLIS
“He was like, ‘Why are you at Webs? You’re not at the bathroom, I can see your location.’ And I said ‘Well, I know where the bathroom is!’” Dellinger-Pate said. “It just made me happy to visit.”
Webs is like Disneyland for yarn: there’s something magical about a store filled to the brim with any and every material a knitter, crocheter and weaver could ever dream up, and the endless possibilities one could create from the huge inventory. The proof is all in the stories, smiles and wonder on the faces of store visitors. But this now large company started out of an Amherst basement, renting looms for classes in the same fashion that school children rent instruments. After 50 years of growth, passion and fun, Webs has become a household name in the fiber arts, earning the title “America’s Yarn Store.”
How it started
When Webs founders Barbara Elkins and Donna Singer approached a local loom company to supply the looms to rent for their beginning weaving lessons, he took one look at the two women and said “you’re nuts.”
The company started with $3,000 in capital, which Barbara Elkins convinced her husband, Art Elkins, a Webs partner who replaced Singer eight years after opening, to take out of their savings account. The investment bought 20 Harrisvillie loom kits for students to rent at Hamsphire College or in the Elkins’s basement. Webs made $55 in profit their first year, but Singer and Elkins had too much fun weaving to give up.
“We didn’t stand a good chance of succeeding and most small businesses fold within five years. By that time Donna was out. I was too dumb to give it up, and then Art became interested and there was no question if we were going to live off of it. It had to be successful,” Elkins said.
Kathy Vigeant and Debra Fox look through yarn at Webs during the anniversary and tent sale in May. STAFF PHOTO/CAROL LOLLIS
According to the timeline on the company website, Webs started selling yarn after the business outgrew the Elkins’ home. In the past 50 years, Webs moved three different times: into a unit at what is now 401 Main St., Amherst in 1984; a Victorian house on Kellogg Avenue in Amherst in 1987; and finally where the company exists to this day at 75 Service Center Rd. in Northampton.
While the couple originally wished to stay in Amherst, the town simply lacked the industrial space required for their fast-growing business. The Northampton property was a tough sell for Barbara. Its past use as a PTVA bus garage was immediately apparent by the motor exhaust and cigarette smoke-tinged walls, heavy metal doors and parking lines on the concrete floor of the warehouse, which can still be seen today if you look hard enough.
“I could not visualize turning it into a store. Art was ready on first viewing. I just couldn’t do it.” Elkins said, using the store’s two cats, Bear and Gracie, as an excuse to not rent the space. “(Art) said I understand about the pets, we will fence a place out back, which he never did. But I had no more defense.”
Art said in the store’s 40th anniversary video that neither he nor his wife could have ever predicted how good of a retail space the old garage would turn out to be. In fact, the building became a quintessential part of the Webs experience.
“My favorite moment for any new customer coming in is the second that they stand on the ramp to look at the warehouse, and literally jaws drop,” Cheek said. “And then they get excited.”
Serving the community
Webs began to carry knitting yarn after the first time they moved locations, in 1984. Local mills in western Massachusetts supplied most of the yarn in the store, selling Barbara and Art mill ends, then their whole stock, and finally developing permanent collections of weaving and knitting yarns.
Since the late ’70s, Webs has offered meeting space to the Pioneer Valley Weavers Guild, a group of weavers in the area who gather to discuss their craft and to peruse their library of weaving books together. The group still meets at Webs each month for a social hour, club meeting and guest speaker. Some of its current members, like Nancy Evans and Francine Gal, even took their first weaving classes at Webs.
Stephanie Langenbeck looks through yarn at Webs during the anniversary and tent sale in May. STAFF PHOTOCAROL LOLLIS
“We’re really lucky to have it here because when I belonged to the weaving guild in Pennsylvania, we met in each other’s homes because there was no place for us to all meet at,” guild member Dorthoy Shimel said.
It’s those moments of community Barbara remembers as the most fun experiences of running Webs, even after her son Steven and his wife Kathy took over the business from 2002 to 2020. She recalls one customer whose three greyhounds slept on mats at her feet during knitting classes, and if the store wasn’t busy, Barbara and Art let the greyhounds loose in the warehouse to race around the shelves. She remembers finding wine glasses in the warehouse for weeks after Webs threw a party during the New England Weavers Seminar. When a customer bought a floor loom, Barbara and Art flew to the person’s house to set up the loom and teach them how to use it.
“We felt that, for spending all that money, the customer really deserved personal attention,” Barbara said. “By the time Steven and Kathy took over, flying had become so expensive that we just couldn’t make it work anymore. But that was a great deal of fun, we got to know the customers if they called with a question. We could put a face on the voice at the other end of the phone.”
America’s Yarn Store
Webs would secure it’s title as America’s Yarn Store in 2003 when the company purchased its famous URL yarn.com and opened up sales to the globe.
“We had no idea really what the internet was. But someone came to see us and suggested that we needed a website,” Barbara said. “First, they tried webs.com and somebody already had that. So Art said try yarn.com and it was not taken. We grabbed it.”
The company’s early website was bare bones and hard to navigate like much of internet at the time. But as the internet grew, so did Webs’ online sales and their ability to meet the country’s, and the world’s, yarn needs. The store grew exponentially, even buying a shipping warehouse in Easthampon around 2012 just to keep up with demand.
Barbara Elkins at Webs in Northampton, which she founded 50 years ago with Donna Singer. The company started with $3,000 in capital, which Barbara Elkins convinced her husband, Art Elkins, a Webs partner who replaced Singer eight years after opening, to take out of their savings account. PHOTO BY DAN LITTLE
“It’s gotten a lot bigger. Like just space wise. It’s gotten a lot bigger. And obviously, staff wise, it’s gotten bigger,” Senior Marketing Manager Mary Kubasek said. “But I think that more importantly, it’s the parts that have stayed the same. It’s the support for the yarn community and just like fellow coworkers, too. I think that that is kind of the better part.”
Even now, the company sticks to its roots by teaching new and old fiber artists through classes and retreats, both virtual and in-person. Webs staff will encourage customers who purchased supplies for a project to come back and show them their creations, and many customers take them up on the offer. These customers often end up on Webs’ social media with huge, proud smiles on their faces.
“Webs and Art and Barbara, and then Kathy and Steve have been a huge part of working with not just the local community, but the worldwide community. Obviously, we have customers from all over the world, and we’ve worked really hard to bring kind of a local yarn store feel to our online customers too,” Kubasek said.
In 2020, a United Kingdom-based company called Lovecrafts bought Webs and the eight yarn brands the company owns. But since the customer service in-store and online hadn’t changed at all, many customers don’t even notice the change in owner ship.
“50 years is pretty impressive when you think of it, especially in [today’s] retail environment,” Cheek said. “We’re not going anywhere. We’re gonna stay right here. We’re gonna be the local yarn store for as many people as we can be.”
