Nicole LaBranche, founder of Spot Colors, shares how Craftybase helped her understand her real numbers and make the leap to running her cross stitch kit business full time.
Nicole LaBranche is the founder of Spot Colors, a cross stitch kit business she built from a creative hobby into a thriving full-time operation. Her kits combine hand-picked colour palettes with clear patterns, making cross stitch more accessible for stitchers of all experience levels.
Like many makers, Nicole started out treating her business as a side income — something she was passionate about, but not yet running with the financial rigour of a real company. She was making products, taking orders, and enjoying the craft. But there was a gap: she didn't have a clear picture of what each kit actually cost her to produce, which made pricing her products more of a guess than a strategy.
That changed when Nicole decided to take the leap to full-time. The moment she committed to making Spot Colors her primary income, everything about running the business looked different. She needed to know her real numbers — materials costs, production costs, margins — before she could price with confidence and plan for growth.
Craftybase has helped me to get more serious about my product costs and my business as a whole as I transitioned into my business being my full time job. It has definitely been a contributor to my hitting 6 figures in 2021!
Craftybase gave Nicole a way to track the cost of every component in her kits — threads, fabric, packaging, and everything in between. With accurate recipe costing, she could finally see what each product cost to make, set prices that actually worked for her business, and track her inventory as orders came in.
The shift wasn't just operational — it was a mindset change. Understanding her true costs meant Nicole could approach pricing decisions from a position of knowledge rather than hope. She stopped guessing and started knowing. And with that clarity in place, Spot Colors crossed six figures in 2021.
Ready to know your real product costs like Nicole does?
Try Craftybase free for 14 days →Cross stitch kits involve a surprising number of components — different thread colours, counted fabric cuts, printed pattern cards, packaging inserts. Managing all of that manually, and still knowing what each kit cost to produce, is the kind of problem that can quietly eat into your margins without you ever realising it.
For Nicole, having that information in one place — tied to her recipes, updating as she manufactured — meant she could spend less time on the numbers and more time on the work she actually loved: designing kits that bring colour and creativity to stitchers everywhere.
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Know your real product costs, price with confidence, and build the business you want.