A retailer that decided to make its own yarn.

Paintbox Yarns is not a mill or a family firm but the own-label yarn of an online shop. The shop is LoveCrafts, which says it began in London in 2012 with a knitting site called LoveKnitting, started by three founders it names as Edward, Cherry and Nigel. The trade publication Craft Industry Alliance reported in 2024 that the company was founded by Edward Griffith and two co-founders who had met at college and worked together at Boston Consulting Group, and that it had raised venture capital and debt from investors including Highland Capital Partners, Balderton Capital and Scottish Equity Partners.

LoveCrafts says that by 2014 it had a US warehouse, customers in 97 countries and a designer-pattern marketplace, that it added a crochet site, LoveCrochet, in 2015, and that in the summer of 2019 it folded both into a single LoveCrafts site. The brand’s own website, paintboxyarns.com, was set up in July 2016, according to the publication dates its pages still carry, so the yarn line appears to date from LoveKnitting’s years; we found no dated launch announcement. An August 2016 copy of that site, preserved by the Internet Archive, described the yarn as “modern, playful and all about colour,” offered 60 shades in acrylic and cotton, and promised that more lines would follow.

Pick your palette.

The idea behind the brand is colour. Its website still carries the line “pick your palette” and now speaks of more than 100 shades, and LoveCrafts describes Paintbox Yarns as “our own brand, designed in house,” whose brights, pastels and muted tones are “developed as one range” so that shades from opposite ends still sit together in a single project. That makes the yarn a staple of striped blankets, granny squares, toys and children’s knits, and the company publishes free patterns to go with it.

The range has grown well beyond the first acrylic and cotton. Its core lines include Simply DK, a machine-washable acrylic, Cotton DK, Baby DK and a sock yarn, alongside wool blends, pure superwash wool, recycled yarns and chenille. The company also sells the shades in colour packs, which it says demonstrate “how versatile our palette can be.”

Simply DK, the line most often used for blankets, is a 100 per cent acrylic sold in 100-gram balls of 276 metres, which LoveCrafts says can be machine-washed at 30°C and tumble-dried on a low heat — qualities it points to for anything made for a child. The cotton lines come in smaller 50-gram balls, and the shades are identified by name and number, from Paper White to Kingfisher Blue.

Paintbox Yarns is sold through its owner’s shops rather than through independent stockists. Its website says it is available exclusively at LoveCrafts and at WEBS, the Massachusetts yarn store LoveCrafts bought in early 2021, which trades online as yarn.com.

Where the yarn is made depends on the line. LoveCrafts does not name its mills, but its 2024–2025 modern-slavery statement says it works directly with around 30 manufacturers to develop products sold under its own brands, and that those “private label suppliers” are largely based in North America, South America, Turkey and Europe. The country-of-origin details on WEBS’s product pages are more specific: Turkey for the acrylic Simply DK and Simply Aran, Bulgaria for Cotton DK and Cotton Aran, and Italy for the superwash wool and the Wool Mix Aran.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all sell yarn for hand knitting and crochet, and they are linked to six countries: Paintbox Yarns and Erika Knight from the United Kingdom, Juniper Moon Farm from the United States, Lamana from Germany, Laines du Nord from Italy, De Rerum Natura from France, and ITO, a label run from Germany whose yarns, it says, come from Japan. What they share is less a place than a question: who actually makes the yarn that carries the name on the label?

Some yarn brands are, in effect, designer or retailer labels. The company chooses the fibres, sets the colour card, writes the patterns and builds the brand, but the spinning and dyeing are done by mills elsewhere, sometimes in another country, and the name on the ball tells you who designed it rather than who made it. Others are fibre-led, built around a particular wool, a flock or a mill, where the story of the yarn starts with the raw material and the place it was grown or spun.

Many brands sit somewhere between the two, and their own descriptions do not always make the line clear. Each guide therefore 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.

A house brand that changed owners with its shop.

Paintbox Yarns has never been sold on its own; its fortunes have followed those of LoveCrafts. The retailer grew by buying other businesses as well as building its own labels. Besides WEBS — which Craft Industry Alliance describes as a second-generation family business that had launched its own Valley Yarns line in 2008 — it acquired the digital patterns and yarn stock of Deramores in 2022, the same publication reported. LoveCrafts also owns the yarn brand of the British designer Debbie Bliss, giving it a designer-named label alongside its colour-led house brand.

In September 2024 Craft Industry Alliance reported that Missouri Star Quilt Company, the American quilting retailer, had acquired LoveCrafts, together with WEBS and Paintbox Yarns. The terms were not disclosed; the publication noted that Sky News had reported the deal as worth tens of millions of pounds. LoveCrafts’ current website names LoveCrafts Group Limited, registered in England and Wales, as the UK parent of its British and American trading companies, including the Valley Fibers Corporation that trades as WEBS.

The paintboxyarns.com site has changed little in years: it still links to LoveCrafts and to WEBS, and its contact link still points to LoveKnitting’s help desk. Day-to-day, the brand now lives on its owner’s shop pages, where the yarns are listed by weight and fibre and the shades by name and number. On yarn.com alone the brand runs to close to a hundred listings, many of them multi-ball value and colour packs.

For a design guide, Paintbox Yarns shows how a retailer can build a brand around a palette rather than a place or a person. Compare Hobbii, another online shop built on its own label, and Debbie Bliss, its sister brand under LoveCrafts. For this guide we use berry, candy pink, mustard and kingfisher blue with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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