How secondhand craft stores are mending the hole left by Joann Fabrics

At Scraplanta, a nonprofit secondhand art supply and thrift store with locations in—you guessed it—Atlanta, January is usually a welcome change from the holiday rush. Executive Director Jonelle Dawkins told Retail Brew she even encourages her team, “If you want to take a vacation, January is a good time to do it.”

However, in 2025, the craft table got crowded; Dawkins said January was “one of the best months that we have had,” in terms of sales, foot traffic, and donations. “Since then, we’ve just been getting exponentially more business.”

One possible cause? Big box chain Joann Fabrics announced its second bankruptcy filing in January 2025 and closed all its locations nationwide by May. That means 2025 will be the first holiday crafting season without Joann since 1943, when its first store opened in Ohio.

While large players like Michaels and Hobby Lobby have since moved in to claim Joann’s share of the market, crafters have also turned to small, local businesses and nonprofits selling used art supplies for a fraction of the retail price. And this December may be an indicator whether these secondhand shops could become a fixture in the craft supply market or if they’ll snap like popsicle sticks under the pressure.

One person’s trash…When Camille Tagle co-founded Brooklyn-based nonprofit FabScrap, she focused on providing fabric recycling services to New York’s design houses. She said large-scale textile recycling has historically been “a challenge, and it’s mostly been because those brands were also not set up in a way where their own staff could manage that sort of redistribution.” One estimate from Boston Consulting Group puts the total amount of global textile waste produced in 2024 at 120 million metric tons.

While Tagle says the majority of FabScrap’s revenue still comes from its recycling partners, the organization also sells secondhand textiles through its brick-and-mortar warehouse and online. Tagle said the online store, launched in 2017, is ideal for crafters who live in “fabric deserts,” with no or few easily accessible craft supplies.

“Pretty much anything that you would need to make a garment, we have,” she said. “[Customers] usually realize how much better the fabric quality is than what they would have shopped with Joann anyway…It’s all these New York designer fabrics that are at a very affordable and accessible price.”

All the stores we talked to said they didn’t receive any leftover inventory from nearby Joann locations that closed, and Michaels acquired Joann’s IP and private-label brands in June.

To the drawing board: Like most secondhand stores, and unlike a photo opp with a mall Santa, having a specific wish list in hand could make for a disappointing experience. Big box craft stores, like Joann, are much better suited for buying a complete set of colored pencils and a clean drawing pad, for example.

However, in areas where Joann closings hit the communities especially hard, reuse stores have done what they do best: roll up their sleeves and get creative. Heather Campbell, executive director of Materials Exchange Center for Community Arts (MECCA) in Eugene, Oregon, started ordering more popular art supplies like ModPodge wholesale to fill in the gap left by Joann. She said Eugene is among the communities feeling the loss of its Joann locations.

“There aren’t a lot of art supply shops in town, and I think people would like to buy their more traditional, higher-end, unused supplies from a place like us because people really do want to support our mission,” she said. MECCA is also focused on preserving the treasure-hunt vibe of thrifting, Campbell said. “The creative alchemy that happens in a person when they don’t find exactly what they’re looking for, but they find something they didn’t know that they were looking for—that just opens this huge doorway to creative exploration.”

Multiple store owners we talked to also said beginners tend to be more willing to bin-dive for colored pencils or start with a half-used pad of paper if it means they don’t have to pay retail price.

Some stores have even repurposed repurposable items. When Scraplanta had an abundance of plain white fabric, the team started dyeing some of it in other colors to vary the product mix, Director of Operations Sarah Phoenix told Retail Brew.

Friendship quilt: Though Joann did offer some art education classes—and had a one-time partnership with video learning site Creativebug—smaller secondhand players have made art education and community building key pillars of their mission. From fabric swaps at MECCA to workshops at FabScrap to sewing classes at Scraplanta, secondhand shops seem to be invested in keeping customers around after they’ve made a purchase.

“Fabric is this universal language,” Tagle said. “It doesn’t really matter what background or what age you are; it has this way of bringing everyone together.”

Regift, recycle, reuse: Secondhand craft stores seem to have an opportunity to grow their share of the market this holiday season. All the organizations we interviewed are planning sales or community events on Small Business Saturday, and Scraplanta is staying open the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve for the first time since opening its retail store in 2022 to cater to holiday travelers.

“We’ve had a lot of people who want to come shop with us, or they come into town for a Christmas break from college,” Dawkins said. “They want to craft with their friends. They want to connect with their families. We want to be open so we have supplies for them to come and shop.”

Given the economic chill in the air, cozy time with loved ones might be the most valuable (and most affordable) gift of all.