Our Story

She will tell you it is hers roughly four hundred times.

Small children are territorial in a way that is almost funny. Everything is mine, said with total conviction, usually at volume. Most of the time it isn't true. The cup is shared. The chair is anyone's. The crayons belong to the class.

A bag with her name knitted into it is one of the first things she will actually be right about.

Yarn & Bear started with a simple irritation: every personalised bag we could find had the name printed on. Vinyl, or an iron-on patch, pressed onto thin polyester with heat. It looks fine in September. By June one letter has cracked and lifted, and the rest follow, and you buy another bag.

So we make the other kind. The name is wool, chain-stitched through thick-wale cotton corduroy and tied off on the reverse where you can feel the knot. There is no edge to lift, because it was never stuck on. It is through the cloth, not on it.

Each one is made to order, by hand, one at a time. Not a print run — a person, about forty minutes, and her name. That is why it takes a few days and why it costs more than the printed one. It is also why it survives being dragged along a wall every afternoon for two years.

She will spot it instantly in a room full of identical bags. She will wear it to the table. She will explain to any adult who will listen that it is hers, and this time she will be correct.

Then she will outgrow it. It will end up in a box with the first pair of shoes, and you will find it again years later, and you will keep it anyway.

We are a small operation. If anything is wrong with your order — a knot come loose, a bag lost in the post, a name knitted wrong — email us and a real person answers. We replace it. That isn't a policy, it's just how we would want to be treated.

— Yarn & Bear