How to start a quilt shop

In June of 2024 my wife created a little online quilt shop. Since that day I've been bragging about her online as loudly as I can and because of that every day for the last year I'm forced to have this exact conversation:

“Hey dude, what exactly is your wife selling? cults? kilts? Oh quilts?! That's cute but is there any money in quilts? How can she make enough quilts to make it worth her time? How much does she sell a quilt for? Is it a physical store or online? Are there a lot of people who buy quilts? How do you find customers? etc, etc"

Today I want to tell the story from my perspective and I share some lessons I've learned along the way.

It’s only brand new to you     

QuiltwithMissKate is an online only quilt shop hosted on Shopify. Technically it is a 1 year old business but like most success stories it has been quietly brewing for a very, very long time.

Kate started quilting as a hobby when she was 12.

17 years ago she took her first job at a quilt store so she could afford to buy a tea pot. (yes, seriously.)

13 years ago her mom and some partners bought a quilt shop in Dayton Virginia called Patchwork Plus where she worked in most of the roles and as manager for a few years.

During that time she took a second job as social media manager for a fabric manufacturer who quickly fired her via voicemail, because they said she wasn’t any good at quilty social media.

She loved working at mom's shop but couldn't find an amicable working relationship with the other partners and since she wasn't an owner she couldn't do anything about it, so she left this job but once again stayed in the quilt industry.

In 2020 she went to work for one of the most popular fabric manufacturers where she would sell fabric wholesale to quilt shops. She worked directly with over 200 retail quilt shops trying to help them sell more fabric, but it meant a life consumed by driving store to store across 7 states, and it was extremely stressful. She was losing her hair and towards the end she called me on the road and said she had to go to the ER for a hemiplegic migraine that was so bad she temporarily lost her vision.

She left that job in 2022 and took a little time off. We traveled the world a bit and lived in Maui for all of 2023 and it was during this time she plotted...

The call to adventure

Kate has had two narratives since I’ve known her:

“I live to make quilters feel seen”

and after 2 decades of trying to help hundreds of quilt shops grow:

“They would sell more if they listened to me. They don’t listen to me, but I’m right.” 

Imagine trying to selflessly contribute to the growth of an industry you love yet repetitively being cast aside. This, she did not like.

When she met me and began spending time in my real estate world many people would either seemingly or outright dismiss her quilting endeavors as not very serious or at least of lesser seriousness than real estate. She really did not like this...

There is a common lore in entrepreneurship that every successful business owner starts as someone who is underestimated, overlooked, and has a burning desire to prove the world wrong.

Which brings us to late 2023 when we were at a goal setting retreat (which we do every year and I highly recommend everyone do this) and we sat at our table with friends and everyone was planning and announcing their grand real estate goals she once again she felt like a an outcast.

That day, at that table, on December 5th, 2023, it was as if a spark that had been simmering in 20 years of frustration and rejection finally erupted into flame. She courageously, and in notable opposition to the group, and said out loud:

“When I get home I'm going to become a quilt influencer and then I’m going to open my quilt shop”.

We came back from that retreat and she immediately began posting on instagram every single day.

Every day she started sharing openly quilters and connecting with with community authentically. She quickly found a large following and a community she loves. Then in late May of 2024 we would leave Maui and move to Austin Texas and only 3 weeks after moving into our apartment she launched the quilt shop.

What the quilt store actually does 

Now that you have the backstory let me tell you the business plan because it's quite interesting.

First, and most importantly, she does not make or sell quilts.

The shop buys raw quilt fabric from manufacturers and resells it to quilters and then they make their own quilts. We have no access to proprietary or exclusive fabric so theoretically anyone can sell what we sell. At the same time she is also not simply a reseller of goods, because of how she packages fabric into kits she is truly creating a unique product. Normally quilters have to spend a lot of time sorting through to millions of patterns and fabric choices to decide what to make. Miss Kate makes life easier for quilters buy selling kits that include all the fabric, pattern, and accessories needed to make a specific quilt. Allowing quilters to do more of what they love, sewing. Miss Kate's creativity becomes her unfair advantage because she knows what types of patterns quilters want to make but also what fabrics quilters will love.

I watch her order fabric every few months and she will go through giant catalogs of swatches looking for golden needles in a haystack, and find them!

Which brings us to another fascinating aspect of the quilt store, wildly long lead times.

When Miss Kate orders a collection there is a 8-10 month lead time before that fabric is created and shipped. Imagine being a new store, with no sales, and ordering product that you'll sell in 8-10 months? How much do you order?!?!? This is what I have watched her do since the beginning, every few months she takes a terrifyingly huge bet on herself and where the store will be in the better part of a year from when she orders. She just made a huge order last week in late July 2025 for fabric that won't arrive until March 2026! She doesn't have to pay for the product until it arrives, but it takes a special type of courage to play big in that type of decision making and she is making very big orders.

Lastly, Miss Kate has a super power for gift giving. In addition to packaging kits well she also creates and sends a playlist that goes with the theme of the kit for quilters to listen to while sewing. She also sends handwritten thank you notes, super cute packaging, and she's always putting stickers in orders which makes the whole thing is very experiential. She says

"when someone gets a package in the mail from me, I want it to feel like they got invited to the cool kids house for a sleepover in middle school".

and the most important part of the business are the Quilt Besties, what she calls the digital community she's created, and she really thinks of them as just that. She embodies a very serious love of quilters and spends all day thinking about how to serve them well. It's a part of the business that has nothing to do with business. It can't be taught, replicated, or dissected - she just cares about the Quilt Besties more than anyone else.

6 things every business owner should learn from Miss Kate

I'm honestly not that great at business and I'm not trying to be, but I have been in the business for over a decade now. I have a bachelors in business (which is useless btw), I spent a few years in banking doing small business underwriting, and the overwhelming majority of my social circle are business people. I know and have read all the popular books on the topic, I know the influencers, I know the theory, and I know how to spot real business operators from those who are just good talkers.

So I do know this culture extremely well

and there is one thing that I watched (in awe) Miss Kate do that I attribute the majority of her success to and if other business people would do it it would guarantee at least a moderate level of success for them and despite this and that it is available to absolutely everyone almost no one actually does it:

1. Miss Kate puts her face on Instagram to talk to and listen to her audience about quilting, every single day.

2. Miss Kate puts in massive amounts of work

I have never worked as hard on anything in my life as Miss Kate works on this quilt shop. She wakes up at 5am and will work until she physically cannot work any longer and has been doing that nonstop for over a year now. She was doing that 7 days a week until we started forcing her to take Saturdays off. So now she works only 12-14 hours a day, 6 days a week. There is almost no room to outwork this human.

3. Kate only focuses on revenue generating activities (sales) 

Lots of entrepreneurs love to do what I call "playing business owner". They spend a lot of time deciding on their business name, their URL, their logo, getting their LLC and bank accounts setup, making sure their website looks great.

Yet none of these things are required to start a business and none of them generate revenue.

At the time of this writing, August 2025, we are still using the free Shopify theme that we started with, we have no logo, and if you go to the website on mobile you'll notice the text is misaligned and the 'e' is on a lower line than the rest of the title. This is a design travesty.

It literally does not matter. All that matters is what the Quilt Besties want.

4. She has completely burned the boats

Miss Kate has been a quilter for her entire life until today and for the remainder of her life she will be a quilter and she will sell quilt fabric. She tells me constantly "I want to do this until I'm 93!".

There is no plan B, there is no backup option, this is what she is born to do and this means the shop gets 97% of her attention (I get the remaining 3%).

5. She has no need for an outcome

The lady only wants to spend money on one thing in this life: books.

We live a very money conscious life (You're literally reading my blog that I wrote about my financial freedom journey so this is probably not a surprise). We share a single 10 year old used car, and we wear plain clothes. Neither of us like fancy dinners, we don't chase fancy things, and we actively avoid unnecessary consumerism.

Every dollar the shop makes goes back into the shop. She has not taken a single dollar in pay since the beginning, and isn't planning to for at least another year.

6. She's not daydreaming

In entrepreneurial circles there is this phenomenon that says all businesses need a "visionary and an integrator". Visionaries are the people with the big great ideas who lead teams and integrators are the people who put everything together.

The joke in our house is that we know lots of visionaries who have no business, no teams, and don't do any work, but think their ideas are world class. Miss Kate ignores this structure and just focuses on customers, she's rarely worried about what's going to happen in 3 years, she's trying to fulfill todays orders as fast as possible.

What does this create...?

Miss Kate is 35 years old with 21 years of experience in the quilt industry. She loves sales, the single most important skillset in business. She will outwork everyone. She doesn't need to take any resources out of the business. She will do this to her last days no matter what the outcome. She tackles the real work that needs to be done.

She is a 5 foot tall quilty terminator. It's terrifying.

Alex's job in the quilt store

This is definitely her shop. Some people have alluded to me being some mastermind behind the company while she is the face of it, and that is incorrect. She is better at everything than me and it works way harder on it than I do. Thankfully, I am a good partner and I have found my little ways to be useful.

Media

My most obvious contribution is through the camera. I've taken product photos since day one which I think has given us a bit of an advantage.

What I do like doing is video story telling, and that’s starting to have a bit more of an impact. I don’t know how much that will contribute to actual sales, but we find immense intrinsic value in the idea that in 10 years we will be able to look back on this entire saga on video.

This recent video is probably my best storytelling to date, and it got decent traction on YouTube which I've not been able to do in 5 years. So I'm finally starting to feel like my skills have a meaningful contribution.

Special projects

I am unemployable because I'm incapable of going to work every day and doing the same thing, but if you want me to go go solve some weird thing that's difficult and there is no instruction manual for it. I am your guy!

When we needed to launch and online store we had no idea how. I researched, decided on, designed, and launched the Shopify store. I hired our virtual assistant, Ele, who does a ton of our back end product management, runs our email campaigns, and has been an overall godsend. When we ran out of space in the apartment I found a broker, scoped some locations, and locked up our new shop.

I do stuff like that!

Now you're ready to open your own quilt shop!

I wrote this because get frequent questions about the shop. How does it work, what is she doing right? How do I start my own shop?

and now you know exactly how to succeed: get 20+ years of focused experience in your industry, work 80+ hours a week of work, maintain an unrelenting positive attitude, take zero paychecks for at least 2 years, and get online to sell yourself each and every day.

How could it possibly be easier?

If you just want to support her and follow the journey instead, follow Miss Kate on Instagram and YouTube.

Thanks!