Row By Row Experience Aims to Bring New Energy (And Sales!) To Quilting Industry Through Shop Collaboration

by Abby Glassenberg | Nov 22, 2016

Cool row from @crinklelove on Instagram.

Janet Lutz opened Calico Gals, a quilt shop in Syracuse, New York, in 2001. “It was a dream of mine, a hobby store really,” Lutz says. Lutz had raised four children and felt the time was right to pursue her passion.

From the start Lutz believed strongly in the power of the experience of visiting a brick-and-mortar quilt shop. “Calico Gals is a girlfriend place, a friendly place that’s fun,” she says. “It’s not the largest store in the area, but I believe that quilting should be a fun hobby and shopping for quilting supplies should be part of the fun. The secret to my success has been hiring really good staff—people who have a friendly personality and love being here.”

A degree in retail management served her well and she quickly grew the shop’s scope. By 2011 she had 15 employees and had opened a second location an hour’s drive away in a less populated area. That summer Lutz was searching for ways to draw customers to the new shop and tried to get in on a local shop hop.

“They wouldn’t accept me. They said the shop was too new and too far away.” Being turned down for the shop hop led to a powerful turning point in Lutz’s career. “I thought, ‘I want to do something different and be really inclusive.” After talking with a fellow shop owner in California, Lutz devised a radically new shop hop model, one that would be open to quilt shops everywhere.

Typical shop hops are both regimented and expensive for customers and shops alike. To participate, customers purchase a passport and collect stamps at various shops over a period of 7-10 days in order to enter prize drawings. Shop owners have to pay several thousand dollars to join a hop, and they are required to buy specially printed fabric and to donate top-dollar items such as sewing machines as prizes. Lutz’s model did away with all of that.

Lutz called her new shop hop model Row By Row Experience, and made the experience of shopping in person the center point of a summer-long event. Each shop would design an original 9” x 36” inch pattern for a row in a quilt and give the pattern away for free all summer long. Customers would visit shops as they traveled, and the first to bring a quilt with eight different rows would win a bundle of 25 fat quarters.

“Yes, shops would be giving away the patterns for free, but I’ve found that people who visit a shop feel disappointed if they leave without buying something.” Shops were encouraged to sell kits for the pattern and do other things to make the visit unique and memorable. She encourages shops to reach out to local designers for help in designing their rows. “That raises the entire industry,” she remarks.

“Every shop is a different experience and people are collecting experiences as they go.” — Janet Lutz

For Lutz, the three key components of Row By Row—travel, collecting, and quilting—were what would lead to its success. “Each shop creates its own experience. It’s not a competition to have the biggest shop that’s ‘worth it’ to visit. A shop can be in a garage with 50 bolts and participate. Every shop is a different experience and people are collecting experiences as they go.”

Marlene, winner at Hickory Stick Quilt Shop, Hannibal Missouri, July 2015.

Quickly Lutz could see that her idea had caught fire with both customers and shop owners. “I made this up as I went along,” she says. “That first year I had to go to shops and talk them into it. I twisted their arms.” Twenty agreed to join. In the second year, it was 65 and in year three a shop owner in Pennsylvania offered to help bring Row By Row to shops in her state. Today 3,100 quilt shops across the US, Canada, and Europe participate in Row By Row each summer and plans to expand into Australia and New Zealand are in the works. Many quilters plan their summer travel around visiting Row By Row shops; 1.4 million quilters participate in the program.

Lutz has refined and formalized Row By Row over the years. At first, participation was free for shops. She’s slowly instituted a modest fee (today it costs $100 for a shop to join). She’s also realized the value of Facebook for marketing the event. Each area has its own Facebook page and coordinator who posts pictures of prize winners with their Row By Row quilts.

Shops sign an agreement that spells out rules, including not emailing the patterns, not listing them online, and not bringing them to shows. There’s also a “hibernation period” when the summer ends, in which the patterns aren’t available to ensure that customer motivation to participate in the summer months remains high.

One challenge Lutz was forced to reckon with was defining the term “quilt shop.” “For us a quilt shop has fabric by the bolt, batting, thread, and inspiration,” she says. “We’ve got longarmers and sewing machine stores that have added these things in order to participate.” Still, this definition doesn’t sit well with everyone. “I’ve gotten hate mail because I let in a shop that’s a drug store or a gun store with quilting in the back. For me, it’s about the experience. The quilter is going in and getting an experience. I go in with an inclusivity mindset.” In fact, Lutz says she’d consider including chain stores such as Jo-Ann Fabrics at some point. “When I learned to quilt I started at Jo-Ann. My challenge is to move people to Calico Gals.”

She’s also created a huge variety of additional materials and options for shops to enhance their participation. Shops can stock collectable pins, mugs, t-shirts, tote bags, fabric license plates, rulers, stickers, and charms for visitors to purchase. Lutz works with Timeless Treasures to release a special souvenir fabric collection. “It’s their top-selling line now,” she says. And, in what Lutz describes as an unprecedented occurrence, 22 other fabric companies license the Row By Row palette and put together coordinating basics to go with it. Shops aren’t required to stock any of this merchandise, but many do.

What started out as a just an event has become a business all its own. Last year Lutz made Row By Row its own LLC. She sees promise in applying the Row By Row model to other industries, including possibly scrapbooking, knitting, and craft beer, if she were able to connect with experts in those industries willing to do the legwork. For quilt shops, Row By Row has been a boon. On average, the program brings in 200 new customers per store in a period when many shops would otherwise see slow sales, and it leads to $30 million in sales for the participating shops overall. At a time when many are bemoaning the decline of the brick-and-mortar quilt shop, Row By Row is making a significant impact in keeping them alive and well.

Donna Selling, enthusiastic rower

8 Comments

Fiona Pullen on November 29, 2016 at 10:39 pm

What a great idea. Good on her for refusing to be put off when she was turned down and instead coming up with an all encompassing better idea. I wish Janet every success with it in the future.
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Beth on November 30, 2016 at 6:21 pm

Interesting spin. “At a time when many are bemoaning the decline of the brick-and-mortar quilt shop, Row By Row is making a significant impact in keeping them alive and well.” And how does a sew & vac or gun shop with a few bolts of fabric participating in the Row-by-Row experience help the brick and mortar quilt shop? There is enough pressure on small businesses like these. We certainly don’t need any more. As a shop owner who participated in Row-by-Row for the last two years, I will decline to participate next year. There are many reasons, but letting every kind of store with a few bolts of fabric feels less like inclusivity and more like a desire to enrich the financial gain of the founders. It certainly hurt my shop this year, and most of the shops I spoke to, and makes the whole “experience” feel a lot less special. Abby, maybe an interview with a random number of participating shops and their experiences might be a nice counterpoint to this interview.
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- Abby Glassenberg on November 30, 2016 at 9:41 pm
  
  That’s an interesting perspective Beth. Thank you. My understanding is that participating in Row By Row is inexpensive. I believe it’s $100 for a shop to join (correct me if I’m remembering wrong). For all of the work it takes to administer and support the program I don’t think that the $100 fee is enriching Janet’s financial gain very much. I feel like from the perspective of a customer if I visited a Sew & Vac or a gun shop that had a few bolts of fabric in the back, I wouldn’t be discouraged from visiting a fully outfitted quilt shop in the area as well, and would likely spend more money in the quilt shop because there’s more on offer. Again, please feel free to explain the counter argument so that I can understand it better.
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Booth on July 11, 2017 at 2:43 pm

I worry too about this statement: ‘”..I go in with an inclusivity mindset.” In fact, Lutz says she’d consider including chain stores such as Jo-Ann Fabrics at some point. ‘

Yikes! Before including Jo-Ann’s as a shop participant I sincerely hope that Janet Lutz reads up a bit on the history of how this retail behemoth got so big; there is a reason why she learned to quilt at Jo-Ann’s and not a small sewing shop. And she should prepare for her idea to be appropriated in a year or two. I can imagine a Jo-Ann’s shop hop – in other words exclusive to the Jo-Ann’s chain.
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Anne Carter on July 11, 2017 at 2:57 pm

Is there a way to include online non fabric shops? Could a photo and a fabric materials list be sent to someone for a small payment of $3.OO. Then the buyer could go to a participating quilt shop for the specific collection. It’s one more way to get the word out to potential customers through their blogs, etsy/craftsy shops
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susan snyder on June 24, 2018 at 2:23 pm

I plan my travels around this event and would be disappointed, if not angry ,to go out of my way to find myself in something besides a serious quilt shop.
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Mary Sprenger on June 23, 2019 at 12:03 am

I am disappointed to see (not see) many shops I enjoyed as participants of Row by Row in the past. It will not be worth my time to make the trek to the Sisters, OR quilt show via Fallon, NV, Paisley, OR, Bend, OR, Rupert, ID. Lots of fun places not doing the Row by Row. My Las Vegas/Henderson areas are still participating.0
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Susan Schmidt on October 8, 2021 at 3:17 pm

I saw an article about the first Row by Row shop hop in 2011, and saw it as an opportunity to explore upstate New York as well as support the small quilt shop businesses. Every year after that my travel area would expand. When my home province of Ontario, and then the rest of Canada signed on, I also visited parts of my own country I had never been to before ! In 2016, I was in Rotterdam Netherlands, and visited a Row by Row participant shop there. I “won” the top prize twice at 2 different shops in Ontario. Nowadays when I am shopping online, I still order the licence plates when I see them for sale. Yes, the program changed over the years…that’s part of life ! Health issues have caused me to give up my car, but I have the best memories of all the shops, their owners, and the beautiful scenery !!
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