Our New Digital Home!

Today we're so excited to share our brand new website with you! This project has been quite a long time in the making. Grainline Studio has existed in one form or another since 2009 and since it originally started out as a personal blog, rather than a shop, things have never really existed in the way I wanted them to. We were always cobbling onto what existed rather than starting new, and with the rapid growth we've experienced over the past few years, things became less and less functional. Now after organizing an epic amount of information we finally have a site that we believe has an orderly layout, clearly organized information, easy to search archives, and everything is finally all in one place!

Since this site is brand new and I'm sure many of you were used to the old site I'm going to give you a little tour to help you get your bearings around here. Lets start with the home page. In addition to the menu at the top of the page, you can use the home page to easily access our shop, our most popular patterns, and our most recent blog posts. We'll be updating the large banners on this page to reflect the newest goings on here so that you can quickly and easily stay up-to-date!

Our new shop page is now housed on the same URL as the blog, which means you can now switching between reading content and checking out patterns easily without being redirected to a subdomain. We elected to keep the PDF and Paper patterns as separate listings as we found in our old shop people were more likely to accidentally purchase the wrong format when they were listed together. You can search via format type or garment type in the categories menu to the left of the shop if you'd like to refine your search further.

Once you're on a product page, you'll find the general garment description and difficulty next to the pattern images, while notions, fabric requirements and more are organized into the tabs directly below. If you're looking for the amount of pages in a PDF pattern before you purchase, you'll find that info in the Additional Details tab along with a link to the other version of the pattern.

In addition to the new layout we also rephotographed all of our patterns! This was an enormous job since we have over 40 different garments when you start photographing all of the pattern variations. This was one of the largest hurdles we had to overcome when planning this site because if you've ever organized a photo shoot you know how expensive and time consuming they are!

We've also updated and reorganized our Retailers page, which you can find under the Info menu heading. If you're looking for a Grainline Studio pattern locally this is where you'll want to check. Keep in mind though, only shops who've purchased via us are on this list so it's far from exhaustive. If your local shop has purchased from one of our distributors we unfortunately have no way of knowing to add it to our list.

The next thing I want to point out is something I'm super excited about, it's our Learn section of the site menu! We've organized all of our sew-alongs, tips, tricks, and tutorials so that you have a much easier time searching. Pictured above is our Sew-Along Directory. You can access each sew-along found on our site here, and we have plans to add the remaining patterns currently without sew-alongs to the site over the next year.

Once you click into a particular sew-along you'll see links to get the pattern, a description of exactly what we cover in the sew-along, inspiration from our Pinterest board for that pattern, as well as an organized layout with photos of each step so you can easily find what post you're looking for.

We also publish a lot of pattern variations, which you can find after the sew along posts on the directory page as shown in the Alder Sew-Along photo above. Finally no more scrolling through endless text based blog archives to find what you need!

Now lets talk about you, the customer. There are a few reasons we're really excited about this new platform over the old one customer wise besides the organizational ones above. First off, we no longer have to send your pattern downloads packaged into a .zip file. You will now download each .PDF file which means if you're one of the many people out there who print via a mobile device or tablet they can now handle our downloads. We also have better control over our physical stock, which means more accurate tallies of what we have available for purchase at any given moment for us and less sold out patterns for you! There are a ton more reasons why we love our new shop that will make our life much easier behind the scenes (and this ease will be passed onto you!) but they're workflow based so I won't bore you with that.

Unfortunately since we've switched e-commerce providers if you purchased a PDF pattern prior to June 24th, 2017 your purchase history wasn't able to be transferred to the new site. We will be keeping the previous customer accounts open on the previous platform for 1 year so that you can make sure to download your purchases. All you need to do to access them is either click the link in the download email you were originally sent, or log into the old site here. You'll need to set up a new account on the new site for future purchases.

If you were previously a wholesaler via our site you simply need to use the same email as the old site and reset your password. All of your info is already entered into our site so you'll be set to order after that.

This post has gotten a bit long but I want to give a quick thanks to everyone involved in this project! My husband Jon, who also happens to be both the Grainline Studio graphic designer and Accounts Manager, designed the clear, easy to use layout. Sarah and Lexi helped me make sense of and import all of the actual information from our old sites into this one. As I mentioned above Michelle Klosinski handled photos and my sister graciously modeled. Our site was coded to perfection by (a different) Sarah of Spunmonkey Design. You'll see her company name in the bottom of a lot of craft site footers, with good reason. I never imagined figuring out so many ways of selling products and switching over this much information from one platform to another could be as smooth and easy as it was but she made it happen! Thank you to all of you for the help!

We've got a lot of exciting things planned now that we're finally switched over to our new digital home! So...take a peek around the site, I hope you enjoy it as much as we have been over the last few days!