Behind the Scenes – The Business Model

I thought I would talk a little bit about the idea behind Petite Purls, and how the Business Model works. As you all know we offer Petite Purls patterns for free to the public, so obviously we do not make any money from that end. We mainly focus on indie designers, and we also like to support new designers, giving them a venue to be published for the first time. No pattern publisher or company can submit a pattern to us, only individuals, and no company pays us to publish any patterns. We may from time to time, publish a pattern from a book. This benefits everyone involved, and if we feel it fits with the current issue, and the aesthetic that is Petite Purls, then we are happy to do so.

For the bulk of our patterns, which are from independent individual designers, we pay each of them. They retain full copyright over their pattern with the agreement that the one that we publish will remain on our site indefinitely (in the archives). For the designer, they get published, they get paid, and their pattern is tech edited without any cost to them.  So in this respect we have paid the designer, and in turn the tech editor. So how do we make any money and how do we have money to pay the designers? It all comes from the ads on our site, and we have been so unbelievably lucky to have had phenomenal support, from day one. When you are on our site, and you visit one of our advertisers by way of their ad, or you purchase something as a result of that ad, you are effectively supporting Petite Purls. So please visit our sponsors, and visit them often, because they are what makes Petite Purls possible. If the designers are the life blood, then the advertisers are certainly the pulse. Beyond our first issue, we could not have afforded to pay any designers, and would not still be publishing our site. So a very big THANK YOU to all of our past and current advertisers.

Then there is the issue of “Yarn Support”, a term near and dear to any designers heart. On occasion, when we receive a submission the designer will let us know they intend to ask for yarn support (which they handle themselves). Other people work out of their stash, and some go purchase new yarn. It really depends on the designers personal situation and preference. Some of the companies that have provided yarn support in the past have been Knit Picks, Spud & Chloe and sKNITches. We have been so very lucky as to have been given full yarn support for our Back to Basics collection, which was extremely important because we wanted consistency in the yarn used through out, so many thanks to Spud & Chloe for that support!

So as you may gather, if we make all of our money in order to support future issues, from selling advertising, then it is highly important that people view the site, the patterns and the ads. If no one visits the site, then no one would buy any ads. We have had a fantastic amount of traffic from the very beginning, which grows with each issue and also grows as we have more patterns in the archives, so it will only get better and better.

This leads me to one very important point. People often ask us to provide our patterns as PDFs. If you have read the above and you understand the business model, then you would see that if we did this, we would greatly reduce the amount of traffic to our site, and it would also open the door for people to illegally copy or distribute the pdf on their own sites/servers etc which is not only unfair to Petite Purls, but also very unfair to the designers themselves. Our patterns are for individual use only. So I hope you all understand why it would not be possible for us to publish in this way. I know that with the growth of Ravelry, storing all your PDF patterns in one place is quite wonderful, but it is just not something that we can do with Petite Purls patterns. Patterns in our archives are just as important as patterns in our current issue, when it comes to driving traffic to the site over time. Every time you visit our site, you are supporting Petite Purls!  I hope that makes things more clear, as that particular request is one of the top that we receive.  We will always do our best to meet your requests when possible!

Behind the Scenes – Photography

As resident Petite Purls photo editor I thought I would fill you in on a bit of how things happen behind the scenes. We have seen so many comments complimenting the wonderful photography in this issue, which for me personally is very rewarding.  It means I did my job well, and it also means our designers did an amazing job at having their designs photographed!

Here the photographer is down on the child's level, and has selected a nice background. A front porch or stoop can be a wonderful place to take photos.

No matter how wonderful the designs are, it all goes out the window if you are not able to capture all that fabulousness in a good photo. Waiting for photos is probably one of the most stressful parts of creating an online magazine featuring knitting patterns, at least for me personally. If the photos aren’t up to par, the design would need to be re-shot, or pulled from the current issue and pushed to a later one. We here at Petite Purls have very high standards, and I have to say, I am pretty picky. The designers usually are dealing with me directly for any photo feedback. It always makes me a bit nervous when I have to ask for a re-shoot. Mostly I wonder if I will upset the designer, because that’s most certainly the last thing I would want to do!

For this particular issue of Petite Purls, we had re-shoots for 75% of the patterns. That’s the most we have ever asked for, and it’s also, of course, the most designs we have ever had in an issue. In every single instance that the designer had a second go at taking photos, the second batch of photos came back looking fantastic! In one of our past issues a very patient and wonderful designer actually re-shot photos at least 4 times, possibly more and they came out REALLY fantastic in the end. Sometimes we need a re-shoot because we need photos of the side or back of the design (and other various angles). It’s really easy to forget to photograph something when dealing with kids. Our designers continue to impress me and they really out-do themselves.

Beautiful natural sunlight, the sun was probably behind a cloud as you can see no harsh lines on the face or dark shadows.

As far as “altering” the photos, I like to get them as raw as possible. Meaning even though someone may be able to mess with their filters and make the photo look really amazing with brightness/contrast and other affects, that photo may then not “blend” well with other photos that are not taken with as fancy cameras and don’t take as well to much altering. I mostly run an “Auto Balance” filter on all the photos, and occasionally I need to use the “clone” tool to remove a blemish, dirt or scratch from a cute little face, but beyond anything glaring I do not alter the appearance of the children at all, in fact I think I’ve only had to do it a couple of times so far out of all 3 issues. It’s important that the photos have a cohesiveness to them over all, from pattern to pattern, so keeping everything as natural looking as possible helps establish the aesthetic we strive to achieve. Classic. Simple. Natural.

A few fun tips for photographing children;

1. Do not photograph in directly sunlight. Find a large shaded area on a sunny day to get the “filtered” light that will avoid any harsh shadows or overt brightness caused by direct sun on the face/skin.
2. Pick a good “background”. Don’t have the child stand directly up against a background, but instead be about 20 feet in front of it. Woods, a barn, a lake, beautiful architecture, playground, or even just a wooden fence, a simple garden or pretty tree. Have the child stand 10-20 feet in front of your “background” and then get close to take the photo. Start out with chest/head shots, and work your way towards full body photo.
3. Get down on their level! This is really important to getting a good photo. You need a “foreground” and good “depth of field” to have a good photo, if you shoot from above you loose both and it really degrades the quality of the photo. So when you take pictures of a child, squat or sit on the ground (when photographing my toddler girl you can often find me with one of my elbows on the ground to keep my hands steady while I shoot).
4. Don’t use the flash. A flash automatically makes a photo feel “flat” and look unnatural. It’s just too much light. It is totally possible to get a good photo inside without the flash. It’s best to place yourself by a large window on a day with bright sunlight. A thin or opaque curtain will then filter the light for you, much like shooting in the shade outside. Other then that you just need a steady hand so the photo won’t blur, but you pretty much always need that with photographing kids!

On the shady side of the house on a very sunny day, and a cute prop (that blends well into the scene) to keep the toddler busy.

Having a good photograph of a design is truly essential if you want the rest of the world to see how beautiful it is. Without it, only the person wearing or holding the design will be able to see all of its quality and detail.

Birth of a logo

I thought I would take a few moments to explain the inception of our logo. I’ve had a few people ask that the blog talk about how the site came to be and any “behind the scenes” type stuff and I thought it might be fun to talk about the logo as it is such an important part of the foundation of the Petite Purls brand and ideology.

First I suppose I should start with the name Petite Purls. We struggled for a while with different names, and even bought a web domain for a site we did not wind up using, once we got some feedback that it would be confused too easily with another knitting company. So back the drawing board. We wanted something that was simple, easy to remember and available as a website domain. We didn’t want something that locked the site into a specific age range for babies or children. I think we went back and forth in emails brain storming various words back and forth. I was worried Petite Purls sounded too much like my knitting business Pixie Purls, but we decided we liked it so much, and it was so simple and perfect that it was the one, and even better the website was available to be registered.

Soon after came logo making time. I’ve worked in the web/graphic design business professionally since I graduated Art School in 2000. Sometimes I find making a logo is a struggle, other times it is perfectly easy. This was one of the easier ones that just came to me and didn’t need much struggle behind it. We originally had sought out some top-notch illustration talent but didn’t get any takers.  At the time we had nothing to offer but the promise of an amazing website, and really how often do those sorts of things come through as planned? So after the frustration of no responses I opened Adobe Illustrator, ran out and found some cute Royalty Free Illustrations to play with. At the time I was earlier in my pregnancy and did not know if I was having a girl or a boy and I was very much in love with the Dr. Seuss bedding from Pottery Barn Kids. It had a lot of blue’s, red’s and grays in it on a background of white. At the same time my daughter had begun making me read “Hop on Pop” to her every single night, sometimes several times. Some of the pages had that nice blue/red combination that I liked so much and it is can be used more gender neutral. The colors seemed perfect but I scaled it back to just the blue and red, not using the yellow/greens etc. I went for a clean/illustrated look and we did look at several different silhouettes, boys, girls and combinations. We liked the girl in the dress best as it didn’t have any sort of seasonal feeling to it so it would work year round, and we imagined the dress she was wearing was knit with loving care.

A few of the original concepts.

I researched fonts that had a “school/hand-writing” type of feel and Allegra said it was just the font she had imagined so it worked perfectly.

Variations on the logo selected, for B&W printing etc and just looking at color and tone.

Next up it was time to design the “interface” as the logo would have a large amount of impact on the design of a site. I’ve often in my career had someone ask me to create a website for them. There is nothing harder than creating a website with no logo or brand that exists to work from. The entire feeling comes from the logo. Here is one of my original comps, and I used one of my designs as an example placeholder (because we had none at the time!). Things have changed a little bit from the below design composition, but I’ll talk about the site design in a seperate posting.

Overall we wanted the look and feel of our “brand” to be clean, simple and sweet. I think we have accomplished that and hope you like it!