We might be a few days late to our own birthday party, but The Crafty Exchange is officially one! 🎉
On 3rd October 2025, after several months spent quietly starting build our social community, we announced that The Crafty Exchange website was officially live. We started with a simple idea: to create a central place where makers could discover the independent businesses, materials, resources and inspiration that help keep us creating.
One year later, that little idea has grown into a community of more than 10,000 makers, creatives and independent businesses – and we're only just getting started.
From a few suppliers to 260 . . . and counting
When The Crafty Exchange directory first went live, it contained around 100 suppliers.
Those initial businesses were researched and added by us, with the aim of beginning to bring together some of the fantastic independent craft suppliers scattered across the UK.
Today, you'll find more than 260 suppliers in the directory – and there's a rather substantial list still waiting for us to work our way through!
Even more excitingly, businesses are now regularly finding The Crafty Exchange themselves and asking to become part of the Supplier Directory. We absolutely love receiving those submissions!
Behind every listing is an independent business offering something to the creative community – whether that's fabric, yarn, haberdashery, patterns, tools, specialist materials, classes or services – and bringing more of them together makes the directory more useful for everyone.
And, as it has been from the beginning, The Crafty Exchange Supplier Directory remains completely free for makers to use and free for businesses to join.
A creative community more than 10,000 strong
The website might have officially turned one, but our social community began growing several months before launch.
Today, more than 6,600 people follow The Crafty Exchange on Facebook, with another 2,300+ on Instagram and more than 700 makers subscribed to our newsletter.
Together, that's a collective audience of almost 10,000 people who share an interest in making, creativity, independent businesses and the materials that make all of it possible.
For something that began as an idea and a very long list of craft suppliers, that's quite something. But the numbers aren't really the most important part. It's seeing people use what we've built.
Helping makers find what they're looking for
One of the loveliest parts of the past year has been hearing from makers who have found a new supplier through the directory or discovered something useful in one of our articles.
Thousands of people have also found their way to The Crafty Exchange simply by searching online for the answer to a creative question.
They might arrive looking for help with sewing a toile, understanding fabric grain, working with velvet, learning about a specific craft, matching prints or wondering whether that suspicious AI-generated sewing pattern can actually be trusted.
And then they discover everything else that's here. We've even had visitors finding us from considerably further afield than we expected!
One particularly lovely message came from an experienced sewist in Australia who had stumbled across The Crafty Exchange online. After more than 50 years of sewing, she'd still managed to learn several new things from the website – and told us she wished they had something similar in Australia.
We think that sums up something rather important about making. There is always something else to discover.
Whether you've been sewing for 50 years or you've just bought your first pattern, creativity is a continual process of learning, experimenting and sharing knowledge.
And that's exactly the sort of place we want The Crafty Exchange to be.
Supporting the independents that keep us making
There's another important reason the Supplier Directory exists. The UK has an incredible network of independent creative businesses. Some have large online shops and established followings.
Others are tiny businesses, specialist suppliers or wonderful bricks-and-mortar shops known mainly to the people lucky enough to live nearby. But finding them isn't always easy.
So much of what we do is about making those businesses easier to discover – helping makers look beyond the biggest names and find the independents offering the fabrics, fibres, tools, knowledge and specialist supplies they're searching for.
Every new business added makes that network a little stronger. And there are plenty more still to come.
But this was never just about a Directory . . .
From the beginning, the ambition for The Crafty Exchange has been bigger than simply creating a list of places to shop.
We want to build a genuinely useful central hub for makers and creatives – somewhere that helps us find materials, discover independent businesses, learn something new, find inspiration and think a little differently about the resources we already have.
Because anyone who makes things knows there's another side to our love of materials.
👉 We buy them
👉 We use them
👉 We save them
👉 We have leftovers
We have carefully folded pieces that are definitely going to be useful one day. We have yarn bought for projects we've forgotten about, fabric that's been waiting patiently for the right pattern and supplies left over from things we made years ago. We have stashes . . . some of us have pretty epic stashes!
And that's all we're saying for now 👀
Year two is going to look a little different . . .
Behind the scenes, we've been working on something big. Really big.
It's the biggest development for The Crafty Exchange since we launched – and it's something we've been incredibly excited about for a very long time. We're not quite ready to show you everything yet.
But if you:
👉 buy creative materials,
👉 use creative materials,
👉 or have creative materials . . . you're going to want to stay tuned.
And yes, we're fairly confident that covers most of you!
Want to be the first to know?
If you've been following The Crafty Exchange on social media but haven't joined our newsletter yet, now is the time.
Our newsletter subscribers will be amongst the first to hear what's coming next, along with important updates as we get closer to revealing what we've been working on. So if you're curious about what year two has in store, make sure you're on the list.
Sign Up to The Crafty Exchange Newsletter today!
Thank you all for an incredible first year 🎉
To every maker who's searched the directory, read an article, shared one of our posts, recommended The Crafty Exchange to someone else, signed up to the newsletter or simply followed along – thank you.
And to every independent business that has joined the Directory, shared their listing, told their customers about us or got in touch to ask to be included – thank you too.
We're incredibly excited about how much The Crafty Exchange has grown in its first year. But perhaps the most exciting part is knowing how much there still is to come!
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