In 2024 Jen Jenks left her job as a product manager at a tech startup, burned out with no clear path forward. She took the next year to upgrade her basement to accommodate a renter, taught herself to spin on YouTube and started prowling thrift stores and estate sales to pass the time and furnish her house in Lakewood, Colo.

Interested in building her own business, Jenks eventually started experimenting with selling her finds with an eye toward going pro. “I tried upcycling different things like furniture, electronics  and collectibles, and I found it was very competitive,” she said.

“I also found that as I was trying different things – yarn being one of them – that yarn was in high demand. Like I would put up discontinued skeins, and they would sell where my other stuff would sit.”

Jenks’ young enterprise, Evergreen Yarns on eBay, follows a movement that’s shaking retailing across sectors. Driven by inflation, supply chain threats, environmentalism and consumer demand, especially among Millennial and Gen Z shoppers, thrifting has gone from trend to preferred shopping channel.

According to the U.S. Re-Commerce Market Report, the projected resale market is expected to grow from $63.25 billion in 2026 to $92.55 billion in 2032 and the craft industry is not immune. These days crafters can source second-hand craft supplies not only at big box thrift stores like Goodwill and Value Village, but they can also visit hundreds of brick-and-mortar creative reuse centers and haunt online resale platforms like eBay, Poshmark, ThredUp, Facebook Marketplace and Etsy for destashed fabric, yarn, beads and even paints.

From Hobby to Business

Textile artist Radha Weaver, a veteran of the denim industry, began quilting in 2021 after leaving her corporate job. Having learned that quilters traditionally used what they have, she was surprised to encounter contemporary attitudes that that gleefully promoted consumption as in “whoever died with the most stash wins.” Instead Weaver focused her quilting on pieces that used denim remnants and she created an exhaustive map of creative reuse and fabric resale stores to help other sewists discover second hand material. (To date she’s logged hundreds of online and brick-and-mortar shops.)

Quilter and entrepreneur Radha Weaver purchased FeelGood Fibers to help connect fabric destashers with makers seeking secondhand materials, bringing sustainability and community together.

When the multi-vendor fabric reuse marketplace FeelGood Fibers announced their closing, Weaver decided to use her business acumen to purchase the platform, which provides a “Poshmark” for fabric destashers, and take it to the next level. Familiar with the skyrocketing interest in thrifting – in 2025 the growth rate for thrifted clothing outpaced traditional apparel consumption by almost four times, according to the ThredUp 2026 Resale Report, with online resale expected to double by 2030 – Weaver thought the business potential and opportunity to help people destash was tremendous.

“I want to do something,” she said, “that actually connects people and affects people and materials and is aligned with the kind of values of why I left the apparel industry.”

Building a Circular Craft Economy

Zeb Walter, another refugee from the apparel industry fed up with corporate gigs, started Disco Fibers in Portland after realizing the city’s reuse centers didn’t carry enough yarn to complete a single project. Inspired by Swanson’s Fabrics – “the no-kill shelter for your fabric stash” – Walter contacted owner, fiber artist Kathryn Greenwood Swanson, to pick her brain on how she managed the yarn she started carrying.

They chatted freely, competition never entering the conversation. “That’s the thing about second hand that she and I both get,” Walter said. “There is so much abundance. We could literally stop producing stuff now and repair what we have, and we would have enough for the rest of our lives.”

Christina Gleason founded Yarn Saver to help crafters and families responsibly rehome yarn stashes, turning a personal destashing project into a thriving business.

Disco Fibers opened online in 2023, and this year moved into a brick-and-mortar space, giving Walter a second sales channel for the donated yarn, roving and fiber-related goods he sells. “What I’ve found,” he explained, “is that most people are just happy to have it go somewhere where people are going to use it.”

When Destashing Becomes an Industry

Necessity in the form of an enormous stash caused Christina Gleason, a seasoned web developer, to invent the online destash market, Yarn Saver. Her first offering? 360-plus unique SKUs. To attract buyers to her site, she tagged her Ravelry stash with links to each product. Most of it sold, prompting friends to ask if they could sell yarn on her site.

The tipping point came when a bereaved acquaintance begged Gleason to sell her mother’s voluminous stash, which included bags of pristine, untouched yarn – and keep the money – just to get rid of it. Gleason knew what it was like to grieve while also helping disperse loved ones’ belongings. “I was like ‘No, no, no you don’t even realize what you have,’” Gleason said of the haul. After the yarn sold, she handed the woman a check for several hundred dollars, money the daughter used to help wrap up her mother’s estate.

“I felt really good after that,” Gleason said.”

So she kept going. Gleason has now upgraded her site and built a business that helps destashers unload yarn or respectfully rehome inherited fiber supplies. To do this, Gleason buys yarn outright after assessing its value through a proprietary process – an algorithm – that rates different yarns based on yardage, market conditions, fiber and other perimeters. (She’s currently in the throes of applying for a patent on this process.) She also helps estate dealers estimate stash values for a fee.

Now three years in Gleason estimates that 30 percent of her income (six figures last year) comes from her web consulting business, the rest she earns through Yarn Saver. “People ask, ‘How do you do it?” she said.

“The numbers just work. I want this to be a source of help rather than becoming some crazy overpaid CEO. If I can maintain this lifestyle and keep helping my family and help other people that’s a plus.”

By focusing her resale business on yarn, Jenks has opened an almost endless inventory stream – a recent buy from an estate dealer netted an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 skeins – and tapped a community of enthusiastic buyers trolling for discontinued products and hunting for single, very specific skeins lot to finish a sleeve or placket. Not only is she paying her bills, but she also no longer rents her basement. It’s full of yarn.

Leslie Petrovski

contributor