From Garage to 500K Crochet Students: The Woobles' Shopify Success

How The Woobles Built a Crochet Community

Justine Tiu and Adrian Zhang started The Woobles with a single goal: make learning crochet straightforward. They packed each kit with yarn, hooks, patterns, and video tutorials. What began in a garage weekend project soon turned into a full shop on Etsy. As orders picked up, their free WooCommerce setup revealed its limits—crashing pages, complex hosting setup, and high time cost. Site maintenance and slow loads stole hours from their core work: kit design and customer support.

Switching to Shopify changed everything. Adrian rebuilt their store in an afternoon rather than weeks. Shopify’s uptime guarantee gave them confidence that customers would never find a blank page. They could install apps to run promotions, manage bundles, or automate workflows without custom code. A simple checkout upsell raised average order values by around 10 percent, while the built-in bundle feature kept stock in sync without extra fees.

• Shopify uptime of 99.99%
• 500,000+ students taught
• 10% boost in average order value

Today The Woobles has taught over half a million beginners to crochet. Bundles and private workshops add depth to the core kit, and their site reflects the brand’s personality all on a free theme. The two founders still handle daily tasks without a dev team, relying on Shopify Flow to automate order tagging and customer emails. Performance stays at 99.99 percent, so every visitor finds a fast site.

That level of reliability freed Justine and Adrian to focus on new patterns, licensing deals, and retail partnerships. They moved from their garage to major accounts like Barnes & Noble without additional staff. If you want to turn a craft hobby into an online success, follow the path they took. Choose a stable platform, lean on apps, and write your own story.

This case highlights how the right tools let a small team make a big impact—even with zero extra developers on board.