Popular sewing pattern and virtual events company, Rebecca Page, suddenly shut down this month. Customers, affiliates, instructors, and brand ambassadors were not notified.
The company’s website and social media accounts have been taken down, including a 65,000-member Facebook group for customers. According to the current owner, co-founder and investor Janine Manning, the company is in the process of permanently closing.
Founded in 2014 by Rebecca Page, a New Zealander living in the UK, the eponymous company offered over 1,000 digital sewing patterns for women’s and children’s clothing, accessories, and home décor. Rebecca Page was also known for hosting virtual summits for makers featuring pre-recorded videos by dozens of craft instructors. Most recently the company launched a membership community that granted sewists credits for patterns in the online library.
Page announced that she sold her shares in the company to Manning in May, announcing the sale in an Instagram post. The company briefly rebranded late last year to You.Make before shutting down earlier this month. Page declined to comment stating she no longer has insight into the company’s activity.
Rebecca Page founded the sewing pattern company after being chosen as an alternate on The Great British Sewing Bee.
The founding of a sewing pattern company
According to previously published interviews, Rebecca Page learned to sew at age 8 from her mother, aspiring as a child to sew her wedding dress. She continued to sew as a hobby for the next 30 years.
In 2014, just after having her second child, Page was selected to be a stand-by contestant for a season of the popular television show, The Great British Sewing Bee, creating each project alongside the contestants but behind the scenes. Although she didn’t make it onto the show, the experience was transformative and she decided not to return to her day job after maternity leave and instead launch a creative business.
“When I didn’t get to go on the TV show, I was like, I’m just going to publish one of these patterns I’ve made for my daughter. Somebody bought it the same week, and then they posted this picture of a little girl wearing this little dress,” she told Authority magazine. Page was hooked, and for four years she ran the fledgling business on her own.
Connecting with a co-founder
At the start of 2018, she signed up for the New Zealand Women’s Business Network, a 12-week mentorship program. Her cohort’s mentor was Janine Manning, a fellow New Zealander living in the UK. An accountant and angel investor, Manning was also a hobby sewist.
When the mentorship program ended in March, Manning invested in Rebecca Page and came on as a co-founder. Page maintained majority ownership of the company. “Janine has spent many hours helping create our financial models and teaching me the ins and outs of the investment world,” Page told Authority magazine in 2021. She said Manning was also a source of encouragement. “Janine sent me a card very early on in the business with the quote ‘She thought she could so she did.’ I saved it and still have it up on my wall today,” Page told iMensch.
“It really says it all to me. Anything is possible. The key is believing you can.”
Expansion and promotion
Manning brought in other investors and, in total, the company raised $1.5 million in funding. In a Zoom interview this week Manning said Rebecca Page was a lifestyle business when she first joined and was not making any money, but that she and her fellow investors could see that the total addressable market in sewing was vast. The goal was to go after it by reaching a global audience. In 2020, the company acquired Sly Fox, an ecommerce fabric shop founded by Katy Kemper in 2016, a step toward vertical integration.
Rebecca Page patterns were enthusiastically promoted by sewing and craft enthusiasts who signed on as affiliates, earning a cut of each pattern sold through their links. Over 300 people became brand ambassadors, promoting Rebecca Page patterns and Sly Fox fabrics in exchange for access to the library of digital files, or free fabric. Summit teachers also promoted the company. Beyond the $100 payment they received for teaching, they earned a 50% affiliate commission on each ticket they sold.
Rebecca Page offered over 1,000 sewing patterns and video classes.
Souring of a co-founder relationship
Leading up to Page’s exit, the relationship between Manning and Page began to sour. One longtime employee explained in a phone interview last week, “Janine is a brusque individual. She approached things with a mindset of getting things done as inexpensively as possible and right now.” Two former employees expressed that Manning was hard to work with.
In the Zoom interview, Manning said the company “never did well” and only broke even two months out of the five years she was involved. “It was really a people and performance issue,” she said, adding that she had been personally funding the company for a long time. “I’m pretty sure there has also been misappropriation,” Manning said regarding what she says was Page’s decision to hire an energy coach with company funds.
“The people in charge of running the company did not execute. I can sleep straight in my bed at night because I know I’ve always done the right thing,” Manning said.
Post-pandemic Manning said Page expressed that she no longer wanted to be in charge of a startup, but instead wished for Rebecca Page to return to its roots as a lifestyle business. Manning told her this wouldn’t be possible now that the company had investors.
When Page sold her shares, she requested that the company rebrand with a new name. Manning says previously Page had been comfortable using her name for the brand, approving spending over $100,000 on trademarks, but then expressed discomfort with it when she was ready to exit. Manning committed to rebranding the company within 12 months after Page’s departure. At the end of 2023, the company rebranded as You.Make.
When she left, Page closed down the company’s Facebook page, a move Manning said made it impossible to run social media ads, an integral part of her turnaround plan. Although Manning indicated this might have been sabotage on Page’s part, a former employee said Page just didn’t realize it was possible to transfer a personal Facebook account to a business.
Post departure
After Page’s departure, the WordPress website for Rebecca Page began to falter. According to Manning, the company paid a developer $20,000, but it wasn’t enough to fix the site. A former employee, though, said the developer Manning hired didn’t have the technical skills needed for the job and Manning was unwilling to pay what it would cost to hire someone with the skills required.
By December, the CEO Manning appointed after Page exited also resigned. When Manning offered the position to another employee without additional compensation, that employee declined the offer and quit. Manning let the remaining contractors go and shut down internal company communications, including Slack and email, and then paused the company’s Facebook group after deleting a series of critical comments from customers. She then took the website offline.
Manning said the email service provider the company used, Klaviyo, was costing $4,000 per month and she’d suspended it. “I’m not technical and not hands-on in the business on a daily basis. I am trying to help customers as much as I can, however I don’t have the technical knowledge on the processes used.” She says she had instructed employees to alert customers of the company’s impending shutdown before they quit or were let go, but the never did.
“We thought she was paying us so poorly because she wanted to sell the company off for as big of a profit as she could,” said one former employee. “We were honestly surprised she completely shut the company down.”
What now?
You.Make still has an active Etsy shop and Manning is now exclusively communicating with customers via Etsy messages. “Most customers buy a downloadable pattern and download it. I can’t see how it’s our responsibility to store it,” she said. “When you buy a pattern at a store, you don’t go back there to get a copy if you lose it.” She says very few customers have reached out so far and only one was angry. “She must have been drunk,” Manning said, “because she was talking about coconspirators and a class action lawsuit.”
There are ongoing discussions about selling the assets of Rebecca Page/You.Make, including two potentially interested parties in the UK and one in the US, according to Manning, but plans have not been finalized.
Abby Glassenberg
Co-founder
Abby co-founded Craft Industry Alliance and now serves as its president. She’s a sewing pattern designer, teacher, and journalist. She’s dedicated to creating an outstanding trade association for the crafts industry. Abby lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
I think she’s going to find that MANY of the customers would use their credits to purchase patterns they liked when they went on sale, but then did not actually download them until they went to use them. Part of RP’s original marketing stated that you would always have access to your purchased patterns through your online account and that you would not need to download all versions of all files. I forsee a lagre number of disgruntled customers in their future.
I would like to have access to the summits so I can down load the classes, Which is why I bought them. This is a big deal to some of us and very upset they couldn’t give us some lead time.
Give us access and time then to download our purchases. I’m not happy at all that we as customers were never notified. 😡.
Given the messaging up to this point had been that patterns could be downloaded as needed, it would have been good for them to get in touch with customers to give a deadline for downloading as they were changing this. Really not acceptable when people had a lot of patterns that they had purchased.
Yup. I’m one of those people who didn’t download a couple of patterns in time. Disgruntled is right!
It is now April 2024 and I’m just hearing of this. I’m so upset, feel betrayed, and untrustworthy of people. This is heartbreaking that I paid for a service and it was taken away. This needs to be fixed!
If your contract included unlimited, lifetime access to downloads and you were never given written, advance notice of a change then you should have access to those patterns. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot you can do at this point. If you do not get your patterns, try filing a complaint with your State Attorney General, if in the US. Not sure what you can do outside of the US.
You are absolutely correct RP nor You.Made saw fit to contact thier customers to advise of the shut down! How dear her say the someone must be drunk.
RP did nor rebrand, she was bought out. She had nothing to do with this disgusting show
I have retrieved most of my patterns and Janine has emailed me the rest. It’s all very well saying if you bought a pattern from a shop you wouldn’t expect to go back to the shop if you lost it. We were told the patterns would always be available and most of mine are on an old laptop which I don’t use now. Just as well I hadn’t given it away. I like Rebecca Page patterns and have always had tremendous help from Beverley Kepple and enjoyed seeing what others had made on the facebook page so it’s a great shame that was taken down. I hope she manages to come back somehow. I’m surprised she’s English as I thought it was an American company.
How did you manage to get them emailed to you?
Most of mine were on a hard drive which has now corrupted, so I can’t access them.
Kate I contacted Janine and she emailed me them but I’ve heard she’s stopped answering people now. We were chatting on facebook.
How do I reach someone who can give me access to my credits/patterns?
A true case of buyer beware, sadly.
This article seems to be biased toward Manning. She killed what Rebecca Page built. What, as a brand, it stood for. Rebecca will be gutted but good on her for standing back from this one.
Very frustrated with the manner this was handled – especially as a purchaser of a VIP access to summits. No opportunity to access the information that was paid for, or download the patterns etc that were included in the summits. Has definitely soured me on buying any access to summits of this nature going forward.
It’s very sad to hear stories like this, and I think they’re more common than we might think.
There were several ‘mistakes’ made in the way things were handled by both partners, and then the new owner, and I feel really really bad for everyone who bought what they believed to be ‘forever’ access to the sessions and patterns.
Good lessons for all of us to consider.
After everything with Craftsy I’ve downloaded all my patterns to my laptop. I organize them in folders and even made sure to back them up. I would be very frustrated to not have access to something I’ve paid for
I, too, purchased a pattern that I was told I could access forever. I downloaded and printed it, but the printing deleted some instructions, so I just want to be able to view it and fill in what was deleted. Please help.
Forever access might turn into a legal nightmare for them. Same thing with people who paid for VIP access and now have no access.
As for if you bought a pattern at a store and lost it, you would not go back and ask for another. This is comparing apples to bananas. Of course if you purchase a new physical pattern, you would not go back and ask for another unless it was damaged or a piece was missing. In the digital world, many, if not most, digital patterns give you unlimited access to download your files, or they allow you unlimited access for a specific amount of time.
I always question when companies suddenly disappear from the internet. There is obviously a lot going on that the public will not be privy to, unless it is publicly traded (which I do not believe to be the case).
Its too bad, Rebecca Page patterns are popular, we print a lot of them for clients.
If access forever was part of the sale contract, and people have screen shots of the agreement, then there could be a lot of problems ahead for them.
I believe it was lifetime access with lifetime being the lifetime of the company.
I would agree- BUT then customers should have been advised of impending closure- so if they had not downloaded all their patterns they could do so before site went down- that would be far more responsible than what has now happened- I was not aware until I saw this post- I will now check to see what I am missing, and double check all my other pattern sites and check on what I have downloaded- or NOT
I have only just found out that Rebecca Page has closed down. Have paid for subscription over the past 3 years. Last payment was in October for 6 months, so should have had access or at the very least notified of the company closing down so that I could download all of the patterns. This is very disappointing. Makes me rethink now ordering any further online patterns.
I got an email from my credit card that I had removed my autopay subscription for the all access to every pattern. I was comfused because I had not change anything. I was not aware that the company had shutdown. They received payment for the month though the access was taken away. I doubt I would support her Etsy shop since this has been an awful experience.
I had no idea rebecca page had shut down. I had stopped my subscription some time ago but I did not download all my patterns. Why would I when I can log on and download them when needed? Now, I have lots of patterns I paid for which are lost to me.
Other online pattern sellers have closed done or changed their website but they always sent emails to remind me todownload the patterns before closing. Very badly done Rebecca Page,
This is nothing to do with RP. She sold to Janine last year. Contact You.Make via etsy and ask for your patterns
I have the yearly membership to the lifetime access. They just took payment in November!! I received NO warning whatsoever. I also had credits remaining and VIP access to a couple of the summits. I am very upset with all of this!!
Check out You Make Patterns on Etsy
For a refund or your patterns you already bought.
I am an indie designer myself and watched RP build her business from the beginning and knew that all was not kosher. She was very good at the spin-spin and had fabulous talking skills, but the nuts and bolts just weren’t there- it was largely smoke and mirrors. Massive problems in her patterns and I know she would hire her “staff” and pay them according to their country’s wages. So, if a person lived in the Uk they would get paid according to those countries average wage – another lived in an Asian country and got paid according to those countries average wage. Same job from both of these employees but huge salary difference. And her summits? Mostly free presenters who didn’t own their videos. For the past 7 years or so all I could smell was a scam !!!
I’m always suspicious of prolific designers, to be honest – and this company had so many patterns… Tried a couple of bralette and undie patterns and wasn’t impressed. I usually avoid membership plans like a curse so no problem there.
Much of your comments are about the very beginning of a company. The criticismd were always heard and acted upon. Also Rebecca Page had nothing to do with the closure of You.Make
I had the all access membership & downloaded most of the patterns but they’re no good without the instructions (unless you are familiar with the pattern) which were only accessible via the website. That is very disappointing.
I received an email from my back Jan 29 stating that my auto pay was cut off but I had already paid the monthly fee. Very unprofessional to just shut down with no warning to your customers.
When Patternfish (online knitting and crochet patterns) ceased operations, they sent an email out to everyone notifying them of their future closure date, which allowed people to download what they had purchased. You.Make didn’t give us that courtesy.
Saying that we wouldn’t go back to a brick and mortar store to get a free pattern to replace one we’d lost isn’t the same thing AT ALL. They should have notified their customers that they were shutting down and allowed us to download our patterns. Shutting down and then telling customers who can’t access their purchases are just SOL, is atrocious customer service.
Why don’t we try and exchange between us? I cant find my download of the Advent Calendar and I need the tree portion. I know they are copyrighted BUT, we were supposed to have access to them always. This is crazy! We paid and now cant have access to OUR merchandise??????!!!!!! I think Jamie needs to answer more requests!!
I have the same thing I buy the patterns when i see them on but didnt download which I know I should have but didnt so that mean we have lost what we have purchased. I really think we should have been told. Bit sad about it all as i loved her work the patterns were easy to follow. great fit . not pleased about losing what I had not downloaded at all
I’ve been trying to figure out how to get my VIP access to my summits. Doesn’t sound like You Make will help with that. Anyone know what to do to get them??? I just heard You Make wasn’t helpful.