LoveCrafts, The Crafting Community And Marketplace, Knits Together $20M Series B

LoveCrafts, the crafting community, marketplace and e-commerce startup, has knitted together a $20 million Series B round. The funding is being led by Highland Europe, with participation from existing investor Balderton Capital.

LoveCrafts says it will use the new capital to invest in its technology and to grow revenue, name-checking the U.S. and German markets specifically.

It brings total raised by the London-headquartered company to $30 million, while it reckons the crafts industry is as a whole worth a whopping $100 billion.

LoveCrafts hopes to sew up a significant chunk of that by growing its craft-ethusiast community and providing a supplementary marketplace for knitting patterns and the like and then selling them the raw materials needed to turn those designs into finished creations.

In other words, the LoveCraft proposition covers the complete craft journey from inspiration, production and sharing the results with the broader crafting community. As it stands, the startup has dedicated sites for knitting (LoveKnitting.com) and crochet (LoveCrochet.com).

“Revenue is generated from sale of designs on the designer marketplace and from the sale of supplies,” the company tells TechCrunch. “These supplies are located in warehouses in the U.S. and Europe serving makers in over 100 countries.”

“The LoveCrafts platform provides a unique combination of social tools, marketplace and ecommerce technology – all woven tightly together!. Makers can find inspiration from designs shared by a global community of designers on its marketplace, buy all the supplies and equipment they need to complete their project and then share the results with a like minded community of crafters worldwide,” it adds.

Meanwhile, LoveCrafts co-founder Edward Griffith reckons Britain’s craft industry is seeing a “renaissance” with many people picking up knitting needles for the first time and others returning to crafts.

“We’re very excited to continue to build online homes for this global community of fantastic makers, one craft at a time. The whole team is thrilled to serve this wonderful community, and to continue to provide them with a place for inspiration, sharing, content and all the supplies makers can imagine,” he says in a carefully stitched statement.