Four young men and a pallet of yarn.

Hobbii is a Danish online yarn shop, founded in 2015 and based in Copenhagen. It began small. Its careers page says the business started with “four young guys and a pallet of yarn,” and an archived copy of its first Danish website, from May 2015, shows a modest webshop at Hobbii.dk: a “small but good” range of knitting kits, crochet kits, yarn, crochet-hook sets and knitting books, with delivery in one to two days and, in its own words, good products at a sharp price.

The company does not name its founders on its own website. When the investor Verdane announced its stake in April 2022, it quoted Jens Reimer Olesen as Hobbii’s chairman and co-founder; the other founders are not named in the sources we checked.

From the start, Hobbii says, its in-house designers gave away free patterns to help people begin knitting and crocheting. That habit became a large part of the business. The company now says it works with more than 350 designers and has a library of more than 16,500 patterns, from beginners’ projects to advanced ones, many of them published as named collaborations with independent designers.

Hobbii’s growth came largely online and through social media. It describes itself as a team of “yarn nerds” whose aim is to bring “smiles to all yarn lovers,” and its story is told through dated steps on its own site rather than through a long trading history: founded in 2015, community events from 2021, and a push to make yarn cheaper and more widely available from 2022.

Its own yarn, made for it.

Hobbii is a retailer, but most of what it sells carries its own name. In its April 2022 announcement, Verdane said Hobbii’s own private label made up 85 percent of its yarn sales. The shop also stocks other brands, including Rico Design, Katia, Rowan and Dale, and carries its own ranges and designer collections alongside them. Beyond yarn it sells needles, hooks and accessories, from its own range and from makers such as KnitPro, so that a customer can buy a whole project — pattern, yarn and tools — in one order.

Its yarn is presented by fibre and type: acrylic, cotton, wool, alpaca, mohair, merino and blends; cake yarns, sock yarns, chenille and colour packs; and ranges labelled as GOTS or OEKO-TEX certified.

Where the own-brand yarn is spun is not something Hobbii states on the product pages, help pages or company pages we checked. A private label is, by definition, made for the seller by other companies; Hobbii does not name those suppliers or their countries in the sources we found. What it does say is where parcels come from: its terms state that all orders ship from its warehouse in Denmark, with returns going to the company in Greve, south-west of Copenhagen, and the company says it now ships more than 1.5 million parcels a year.

The other half of the brand is the community. In 2021, Hobbii says, it launched Hobbii Bingo, a weekly live stream at which customers play for prizes and talk about yarn, and it also runs live shopping broadcasts, quizzes and knit-, crochet- and make-alongs on its social channels. The company presents these as a way to make a solitary craft more social; for the brand, they also keep customers coming back to the shop.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all sell yarn for hand knitting and crochet, and they come from seven countries: Bergère de France from France, Debbie Bliss from the United Kingdom, Rico Design from Germany, Hobbii from Denmark, Sandnes Garn from Norway, madelinetosh from the United States and We Are Knitters from Spain. What sets them apart is less the fibre than the route a ball or skein takes to reach a maker.

Yarn still travels by many roads. Some of it comes from old mills with long regional histories; some is sold under a designer’s own name; some sits in ranges stocked by craft shops and department stores; some is bought from online retailers that ship across borders; some arrives in a box as a kit, with needles and a pattern; and some is dyed in small batches by hand. Each guide shows which of those roads a brand travels, and how its name, colours and tone of voice change to suit it.

Each guide also separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now and where its yarn is made — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Growth equity, and a global yarn shop.

The best-documented moment in Hobbii’s history is outside investment. On 20 April 2022 the European growth-equity investor Verdane announced an investment in Hobbii A/S through its Verdane Edda II fund. The terms were not disclosed, and the announcement did not say how large a stake Verdane took. Hobbii was advised by Financo Raymond James, Verdane said.

The announcement gave a picture of the business at that point. Hobbii, Verdane said, had operations in more than 50 countries and 12 key markets, including the Nordic countries, Germany and the United States; its revenue had grown by more than 80 percent a year between 2019 and 2021; and it had more than 350 employees, mostly in Copenhagen. Verdane said the next focus would be Germany, the US and the Nordics. Its director Nils Bouchet spoke of building “the leading global yarn universe,” and Jens Reimer Olesen said Hobbii wanted to set itself apart as a platform and a community. Verdane still listed Hobbii as a portfolio company, a partner since 2022, in late 2024.

The company’s structure reflects that spread. Its US terms are issued by Hobbii Inc., described as a subsidiary of the Danish parent, Hobbii A/S, and it runs separate Danish and international shops. Hobbii’s careers page says it has won the Gazelle award for Denmark’s fastest-growing companies, without giving a year; we give that as the company’s claim.

For a design guide, Hobbii shows a retailer becoming a brand: the shop, the yarn label and the community all carry the same name. Compare Isager, a Danish yarn house built on its own designs, and Rico Design, one of the brands Hobbii stocks. For this guide we use rosehip, pink and sage with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hobbii’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.