I stopped calling it a hobby and started charging for it

Who: Heather Rae, Heather Rae Atelier
What: One-of-one handbags made from vintage needlepoint tapestries, design and create needlepoint canvases and kits, most notably a Wearable WIP (work in progress) you stitch and wear
Format: Physical product · USA · English
Started: August 2025
Audience: around 37,600 Instagram followers, around 1,200+ Substack subscribers (The Long Stitch)
Payers: around 1,000 buyers
Promotion budget: $0
Income: yes, my main income
Status: active and growing
Channels: your own newsletter, text social media, offline & word of mouth

What worked: Instagram for attention, showing the process rather than the finished object – but the real machine was her Substack newsletter, which turned followers into buyers.
The result: The Wearable WIP launch (The Mimi at $575, The Penelope at $475) sold out day one, with Substack subscribers given first access.
The catch: Growth wasn’t a marketing channel at all – a woman named Ellen sending her a box of inherited tapestries turned the shop into something closer to a custodial mission.

I’m a stitcher. That came first, before any of the rest of it. Needlepoint has always been sold to women like me as a hobby – something pleasant to do with your hands while you watch something on television – and I never understood why. It’s a discipline. It takes hundreds of hours. It’s an heirloom by the time you’re finished with it. And then, traditionally, you have it made into a pillow.

The thing that started the business was a needlepoint purse I couldn’t buy so I had to make. And then came vintage tapestries dying to have a second life. Some woman had spent a year of her life on it. She’d chosen every color. And it had ended up in a bin at a market with a price on it that wouldn’t buy lunch. That felt like a moral problem more than a business one.

So I started making them into bags. Structured, lined in Liberty – the same standard of construction you’d expect from a luxury house, because the stitching deserved it. One tapestry, one bag, never repeated. Then I started drawing my own canvases and kitting them, so that women who wanted to stitch their own could start from something worth their hundreds of hours.

I’m a Christian woman with a husband and boys at home and a Morkie named Alta. Proverbs 31:13 – she selecteth wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands – has been on the wall the whole time. That verse is the business plan, more or less.

The first handful were people who already knew me – women who stitch, who understood immediately what I meant by taking needlepoint canvas and turning it into something you’d actually carry. The first hundred came from Instagram, one post at a time, and almost entirely from showing the work in progress rather than the finished object. The single most useful thing wasn’t a viral post. It was that a few women in the needlepoint world started sending me their own inherited tapestries – pieces their mothers or neighbors had stitched and no one knew what to do with. That turned customers into collaborators, and their friends followed them in.

Instagram, showing the work rather than the product. The posts that grew the account were never the finished bag on a clean background. They were the middle of the process – a tapestry half-taken-apart, a leather trim being pinned, a canvas I was drawing. Needlepoint people want to see the stitches. The finished-object posts sell; the process posts recruit.

Substack – The Long Stitch. This was the real machine. Instagram gets attention, but a newsletter gets belief. I write about the work honestly, including the parts that go badly, and I write about the women whose tapestries I’m finishing – actual women, with names, whose lives I go and research. That’s not content strategy, it’s just the interesting part. But it’s what turned a follower into someone who’d spend $575 on a bag from a woman she’d never met.

Preorders instead of inventory. The Wearable WIP launch – The Mimi at $575 and The Penelope at $475 – sold out day 1. Sequenced deliberately: Substack subscribers got early access first, then the Klaviyo list, then Instagram last. Giving the newsletter first claim did two things – it sold well, and it taught everyone else where to stand next time.

Klaviyo flows, unglamorously. Waitlist nurture, welcome series, thank-yous, post-purchase. Nothing clever. It just runs while I’m at the sewing machine.

Digital products as a lower rung. The Finishing Studio at $40, a clutch pattern generator at $25, a thread estimator at $10. Small money, but they bring in people who aren’t ready for a $575 bag and let them buy something from me anyway.

Wholesale. Opening the Orangerie canvases to shops put my work in front of women who will never see my Instagram, in the places they already trust.

Someone in this industry copied a pattern of mine fairly directly. I chose not to say anything publicly. I withdrew the business I was giving her and moved on. I still think that was right, though I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sit badly for a while.

The supply chain nearly broke me twice. Canvas supply has been dreadful and hard to manage and plan around. It took going directly to Zweigart in Germany to fix it. And a container of Orangerie orders sat in customs in Memphis long enough that I had to write to every single buyer and tell them their thing was stuck in a warehouse in Tennessee.

A woman named Ellen sent me a box of tapestries her neighbor had stitched. Two dozen or so, decades of one anonymous woman’s work, chinoiserie influences all through them, and no one left who wanted them. She sent them to me because she’d decided I was the person who’d know what to do.

That’s when it stopped being a shop and became a custodial thing. People started sending me their mothers’ work. That’s not a marketing channel – you can’t build it on purpose – but it changed what the brand was for, and everything since has grown out of that.

Women who stitch, and women who buy beautiful things, and the overlap between those two groups is much larger than the needlepoint industry has ever admitted. She has a good handbag. She also has a canvas in a bag by her chair that she’s been working on since Christmas. Nobody was making anything that respected both of those facts at once.

Because of who she is, almost everything about how I grow follows: no discounting, no urgency tactics, no exclamation points. She has been marketed to her entire life and she can smell it. What works with her is showing her the work and telling her the truth, including when the truth is that her order is stuck in Memphis.

Search is changing under all of us. People ask an AI what to buy now instead of scrolling a hashtag, and I don’t yet know what that does to a brand like mine that lives on images and voice. My guess is that it makes owned channels – a newsletter, a list – more valuable rather than less, because a list can’t be de-ranked.

I think small brands with genuine craft credibility are going to do disproportionately well, and I think the middle is going to hollow out. What I’d bet against is any strategy that depends on posting more.

Heather Rae Atelier makes one-of-one handbags from vintage needlepoint tapestries, and canvases and kits for women who’d rather stitch their own. It’s for the woman who wants her needlework to be something she carries, not something she stores.

Website: heatherraeatelier
Instagram: heather.rae.atelier
Substack: heatherraeatelier

Found your own audience or customers without a serious ad budget?

Email Alex at [email protected] if you'd like to share yours – he'll send over a short questionnaire, and your answers become a story just like this one, free. Past respondents have picked up real, tracked signups and sales just from being featured.

Subscribe for more like this – full stories and digest roundups land in your inbox about once a week, each one showing how someone found their customers while spending next to nothing on ads.

– Alex, tinyfound