The first thing that Lincraft managing director John Maguire would like you to know is that he’s still open for business. On Tuesday, the fabric, crafts and homewares chain emailed customers to announce its 32 stores would be shutting their doors in the coming months and the business would transition to an online-only model.
“I was just doing a social media thing to remind customers we’re closing, we’re not closed,” he said on Wednesday.
“It’s a hard message to give because you want to be truthful about the future. But by the same token, you don’t want them thinking that you don’t exist as of tomorrow.”
Maguire has spent the past 21 years fighting for the specialty retail chain’s future. Lincraft began as a Melbourne market stall in 1938, then known as Suzanne Silks, and was run as a family business across three generations before it fell into receivership in 2005.
When Maguire and co-owner Brian Swersky took the keys, it was broke, saddled with debt and on the precipice of being liquidated by the banks. But it had passionate and loyal employees and customers. Maguire made some tough calls (“survival cuts”): renegotiated with landlords, shut unprofitable stores, shrunk support teams and even wrangled better deals with energy and electricity providers.
“Thanks to the effort of our team, we survived 21 years on a business that was basically broke 21 years ago,” said Maguire. “But I knew that, like everything, it’s going to come to an end.”
The plan to close bricks-and-mortar stores has been two years in the making. About 300 staff will lose their jobs. “We saw the writing on the wall some time ago.”
The world has changed over the decades. Those who once would have been Lincraft’s core customer base – mothers making clothes for their family – simply didn’t need to any more; clothing chains were on the march. Eventually, online shopping took off in Australia. The local ecommerce retailers were joined by international marketplaces (which now threaten to dwarf them).
“The fact is, mums would be home, and they would be sewing and making the garments for the kids,” he said. “All that’s just gone. No one can possibly make a garment today buying fabric and sewing it for what they can buy from China off the shop floor today [with] fast fashion. But that’s the evolution of retail.”
The kids these days are even less interested.
“If you put a piece of paper with crayons in front of a young child, or you give them an iPad, I know which one they’re going to pick up,” said the managing director. “We were never going to win that race, and although sales haven’t fallen off the cliff, they’ve actually held very stable.”
Over the decades, Maguire and his team kept pushing to keep Lincraft relevant. Marketing evolved to ditch catalogues in favour of social media; Lincraft cultivated loyalty through club memberships. In the early 2010s, the retail chain focused on education, bringing in new puzzles, toys and activities and provided free resources so people could teach themselves how to make items such as bags, patchwork quilts and scrapbooks.
Around 2017, Lincraft broadened the range even further, adding homewares, bed linen, quilts and pillows to its range. It was, according to him, “very, very successful”.
But there were only so many square metres in every store. Lincraft’s attempt to stock more items that appealed to a wider range of people clashed with customer demands for specific fabrics or threads or ribbons. Lincraft’s strategy of opening smaller stores had not aged well.
COVID gave some respite. Demand for arts and crafts soared as people sought things to do under lockdown. It didn’t last long.
Could the company have done more? “I think we were slow to understand the changing market,” said Maguire. The brand, Lincraft – a portmanteau of linen and craft – eventually became a constraint on what the business could be known for in the minds of the customer. The ecommerce business, while it has been around for 18 years, was slow to take off.
Today, Lincraft still has half a million committed customers, if their loyalty program is anything to go by. Most of their customers are 40 years or older, creatives and people who want to make clothes no one else has.
Lincraft’s 32 stores are due to close in coming months as leases come to an end. Maguire is already seeing an uptick of foot traffic from customers who have caught wind of the stores’ imminent closure. The online-only business will feature an expanded range of products.
Will Lincraft still exist 21 years from now? “Well, I hope so,” said Maguire.
“I think that the retailing is changing, but just change with it, and I do think it will be around in some capacity for the next 21 years. I’m very confident about that.”
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Jessica Yun is a business reporter covering retail and food for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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