By Cadie Connors
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Twenty years ago Hamilton, Mo., was on the verge of being a ghost town. Historic downtown buildings were in disrepair. Streets were vacant. Sidewalks were cracked and unwalkable.
Yet with the opening of Missouri Star Quilt Company in 2008, co-founder Jenny Doan and her family eventually transformed Hamilton into a tourist destination — a place CBS news calls the “Disneyland of Quilting.”
Today Missouri Star Quilt Company attracts nearly 100,000 visitors every month by the busload. They come to visit the now 16 stores that provide not only the largest selection of pre-cut fabrics in the world, but also home decor, crafting projects and more.
How did the Doan family transform a small town and create a successful, expanding enterprise?
That was exactly the question of high-profile Silicon Valley executives from Google and YouTube who sent teams to Hamilton to learn the company’s formula for success.
Yet, Jenny will tell you that it wasn’t exactly planned.
Jenny, whom Forbes has called “the Oprah of quilting,” at first resisted a move to Missouri.
She had lived in California since her marriage to her husband, Ron. The cost of living, though, had become burdensome, especially with seven kids to raise. After one of their sons had an expensive operation to remove a tumor in the mid-1990s, the Doan family needed to find a more affordable place to live.
Ron suggested moving to the Midwest. So, in 1995, Jenny and Ron put their kids in the car and headed to Hamilton. Ron was eventually able to secure a job with the local newspaper working as a machinist, making a living and modestly provide for his family. Yet, thirteen years after the move to Hamilton and their children grown, Ron and Jenny didn’t have a lot of savings to retire.
Concerned about their parents, the children began to look for ways they could improve their parents’ income. One of the four sons, Alan, proposed a simple business idea based on Jenny’s quilting hobby that unexpectedly grew into a family enterprise. Alan suggested buying a long-arm quilting machine. Daughter Sarah took out a second mortgage on her home to buy the 10-foot-machine and purchased a building in downtown Hamilton to house it.
Thus, Missouri Star Quilt Company was born in November 2008. To increase business the first year, Alan suggested posting tutorial videos on the relatively new social media channel called YouTube. In the videos Jenny gave step-by-step instructions on how to make a variety of quilts.
At the end of their first year, the YouTube channel had almost 1,000 subscribers. By the end of the next year, 10,000. And by 2013, Jenny was a YouTube “sewcelebrity,” and their annual revenue had topped $4 million.
The subscribers wanted to know more. Where could they buy the pre-cut fabric Jenny was using? Alan saw this as another opportunity for the company: to sell pre-cut fabric online. An innovative idea because pre-cut fabric wasn’t easily available, much less online at that time.
Missouri Star Quilt began selling the pre-cut fabric bundled together with different, complementary prints, making it easier and faster to make quality quilts. As a result, the business filled a need and grew rapidly.
Jenny, known as the most popular quilting instructor in the world, still films a YouTube tutorial every week. Currently her channel boasts almost 825,000 subscribers and more than 250 million views. Missouri Star Quilt’s flourishing e-commerce along with the brick-and-mortar retail stores has flourished into a global business.
Missouri Star Quilt will be celebrating its 15th anniversary and will open three new stores in downtown Hamilton. Quilted Home is a home store with finished goods as well as fabric and kits to create various projects, and Santa’s Sewing Shop is a holiday shop open year-round. The Fabric Market is the most unique fabric buying experience that includes an old-fashioned soda shop. These three new stores make for a total of 16 stores in downtown Hamilton.
As Jenny looks back over the past 15 years, she is in awe at the joy and opportunities that have come from a simple idea during a difficult time.
She believes that giving a quilt to someone else is a labor of love that is life-changing. Whether a quilt is gifted to a family member or is made as a donation, Jenny wants to help people to know that what they do matters.
“What I realize now is the pieces of all of our lives are being stitched together. The fabric stretches all the way back to our mothers and fathers, and grandmothers and grandfathers,” Jenny Doan wrote. “But in all of our lives, so many of the little pieces of our past are part of the beautiful quilt that tells our story.”
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