What is Pink? Lessons Learned from Running a Virtual Store

As most of you have probably seen our FabMo online store offering curb site pick-up. We started it when we couldn’t do in person events and kept it going for those how don’t feel comfortable mingling with people outside of their bubble or can’t get one of the limited appointments for our events.

If you haven’t visited the store, have a look, you will find many beautiful things. It’s like FabMo - just virtual.

We have a small team of people working on different aspects of the store. Bron is measuring, labeling and photographing yarns, books, some fabric and a lot of the notions and the “fun and weird things” that sometimes end up in the store. She is also the one who picks almost all orders and gets them ready for pick-up. She is at FabMo every Tuesday morning so if you ever picked up your purchases then you’ve met her.

Leslie is the tech person, she set up the online store with all that pesky stuff like the payment system and when something goes wrong it is her we are all frantically email and call.

Then we have Deborah and Janet who work tirelessly behind the scenes to upload all the products to the webpage. It is a time consuming job of uploading pictures, adding descriptions, prices, sizes, and quantities and then making sure everything looks good and is correct.

Holly works on the backend, deletes items that sold and every month or so makes sure inventory is well organized so it’s easier to find things. Sometimes she lists products as well, because, as with most of us regular volunteers, somewhere along the way stuff ended up in her garage for storage after a particularly large donation or a move. These treasures tend to also end up in the virtual store.

That leaves me, who - along with a growing cast of helpful volunteers and, of course, Hannah’s support - selects, measures, labels and photographs most of the fabrics we offer. I am at FabMo Friday afternoons, so if you ever picked up then, you probably met me.

Eight Months In

Just about eight months after we listed our first items, I am happy to report, that the store is a success. We have sold over 2,100 items so far - a pretty amazing number if you imaging how large a pile of fabric that would translate into.

Thanks to all you online shoppers for making what started out as a little Bron and Tina experiment such a success!

Along the way we have learned a few things most of which are too boring to talk about, like how to deal with several pictures in listings with variants, or that whole tax thing. Then there are the painful - literally - experiences like that the mezzanine, where we keep most of the inventory, has very low beams that are ideal for hitting one’s head especially if one is, like me, 5’10” and pretty scatterbrained and easy to distract. We also learned that one never knows what sells. Sometimes we list fabric that we all agree will be grabbed up immediately - just to find it still sits in inventory two weeks later. The opposite happens, too, items that we are not super excited about that are gone the next day. Our shoppers sure keep us guessing and wondering!

The most interesting lesson I learned, though has to do with color.

Beige? Tan? Marron Glace?

It all started in the fall - and with that shorter days that made it impossible for me to photograph using daylight. By the time I got to FabMo and measured and labeled the fabric it was dark outside. Artificial light is terribly difficult to work with and - as I learned the hard way - renders colors in all sort of weird ways. Purple looks black, light green comes out as beige, navy as grey, or grey as navy. Neither my phone camera nor my fancy DSLR could handle it and so some people ended up getting celadon colored fabric with light grey stripes when they thought they bought cream fabric with white stripes.

That had to stop.

Frantic activity ensued, I tried out different lights, color adjusted bulbs, a small shooting tent and finally a big shooting tent with lots of LEDs.

We also decided that - when in doubt - I would write the color on the label so that our listers had something firm to go by when describing the item.

Easy, right?

Well, actually not.

This opened another whole can of worms. The “What is pink?” or more fittingly for FabMo “What is beige? Cream? Off-white? Tan?” problem.

Seriously, this isn’t at all clear. I can’t count the times I have now held up a piece of fabric and asked whoever is in the warehouse “what do you call this color?” Trust me when I say that if you ask three people what to call a color you will get four different answers. At least.

Is this more of an oatmeal, fawn, sand or biscotti? Maybe latte or macaroon? Pearl? Powder? Parchment?

We don’t get pink very much but when we do, especially passionate discussions ensue. Most people agree on hot pink. That’s the easy part. But as soon as we get into the rose and french rose, sandy or dusty rose, the pink lemonade vs flamingo, the lavender vs lilac discussion things get murky. People do have opinions on things like that. I do, too, to my surprise.

The internet is no help, if you google colors you will find that there is even less of a consensus on what constitutes fuchsia than among the FabMo volunteers.

And that is one of the easy ones. I thought. But here you go: I googled “fuchsia color” and got this:

I wouldn’t exactly call this a consensus!

So, I thought, I’ll be smart and just use the color descriptions on the label. And that works, if there is a label, it has the color information and the designers didn’t get too creative - or too francophile.

Case in point: what do you make of a color called verveine or trianon, I guess “elephante” is pretty self explanatory but why is Bordeaux dark brown when, obviously, hearing Bordeaux every self-respecting drinker thinks of red wine and dark red? Sanguine? I expected blood red and got like a darkish orange. Verveine, btw, turned out to be light green and trianon light grey.

Anyway, relying on fancy designer terms didn’t solve the problem, just moved it from: “What do you call this grey?” to “What in the fresh hell does trianon look like?”

Now that you know what we are up against here, dear shoppers, please keep an open mind when it comes to color rendering on pictures or color names and descriptions. The LED lights have helped a lot with photography but whether a blue is a marine or a navy will probably always remain a topic of discussion and potentially contention.