23. Anna Feldman
“...it’s not just about the shop speaking to the community, it’s as though the community really spoke to the shop. It is a dynamic relationship”
When I first moved to Clapton a decade ago, I knew I’d landed in the right neighbourhood for me when I discovered there was a yarn shop around the corner. Wild and Woolly is something of a local landmark; even non-knitters stop to admire the imaginative window displays (more on those later), so Wild and Woolly is something of a local landmark. The woman behind it, Anna Feldman, is someone who has been on my list to interview since The Worshipful began, and here we finally are. She runs Wild and Woolly with colleague Brönte at her side. You will always be warmly welcomed by one or other (or both) of them and can be sure of a safe pair of hands, whatever your knitting or crochet needs might be.
Anna has always knitted and learned how when she was quite young: “I was about nine. My mum was pregnant with my brother - there was a big gap between me and him. We were away on holiday, my older sister and I, and my pregnant mum, and we started knitting for the new baby. It was a nice way for us to get ready for the baby to come. My sister was eleven and I remember she knitted a much more complicated thing than me. I just made little mittens that didn't have any thumbs!”
Anna’s childhood was spent making things. She says she was quite industrious and usually eager to not do whatever school work had to be done, because she just wanted to get on with “putting things together. But knitting wasn’t necessarily a passionate hobby at that time, as it was very much a slow burn”. She was close to her grandmother, who never had idle hands and was pleased that there was one child out of her grandchildren to whom she could give little projects. “I was very enthusiastic about it, doing little cross stitch kits and things like that. It was our thing that we did together. She would be watching telly and be crocheting, and when she came to visit us, we always had a mending pile that we saved for her visits. She took a lot of joy in all that stuff”.
Remembering fondly the comfortable silence that would exist between her and her grandmother as they worked alongside one another, Anna says “it's one of the many ways that we communicate and engage with people – you’re just doing your thing together. My grandmother was an awkward person - a foreigner with a foreign accent and she really felt her foreignness. She had come from Austria as a refugee in 1939. She was well-educated and came from a middle-class family, but her first job in Britain was cleaning, so suddenly she was living a different life from the one that she had grown up with. She made her peace with it, but also there was something clunky in her socially. Dislocation has a profound effect on people - there are so many knock-on consequences that they must deal with when they’re forced to abandon home”.
Anna’s teenage years were up and down. Her parents separated and re-married and started new families. During this time knitting was a great comfort to her “but it was also very private. If I was on the sofa knitting in front of the telly, I would put it away as soon as anyone walked through the door. We’re talking about the early 80s, and it wasn’t until the late 80s that [British yarn company] Rowan started making knitting sexy again”.
Moving to London from Norfolk with her mother, stepfather and siblings at 16, Anna found the capital a bit of a shock to the system. She went to school near Kentish Town to do her A-Levels and was delighted to discover a yarn shop nearby, where she could spend the money that she had earned from babysitting: “I used to have an arrangement there, where they would put all the wool I needed for a project to one side, and I would collect some each week when I could afford to buy it”.
In 2015, after fifteen years of working in IT, Anna opened Wild and Woolly. She did project management on web development projects, overseeing internet installation in countries where the telecommunications were very poor. It was an unusual role and involved traveling overseas regularly for meetings and projects. “On these trips overseas, I’d often meet up with a Uruguayan colleague [Uruguay is renowned in the knitting community for its beautiful yarns] and she said she always remembered that I'd be there with my knitting, so at some point I must have overcome my shyness and started knitting in public!”
Once Anna’s enthusiasm for that role started to wane, she realised it was time to think about a change of career. But a career switch in your forties is no small thing, and it took her a while to work out which direction to go in. “My kids said to me, well, you like knitting! But I'm not a designer and I don't make yarn. What can I do with knitting?”
Nevertheless Anna’s children had planted a seed in her mind. She enrolled on a City & Guilds hand-knitting course: “I thought it would be an interesting way to get deeper into something that I already understood. There was this group of women that I studied with, and it was very meticulous and those women were nice to be with - they weren't self-deprecating, they took it seriously and you didn't have to laugh about the fact that you were into knitting. We went to the V&A with magnifying glasses to look at the Shetland laces!”
During that time, Anna might visit a wool shop but find that while the staff were friendly, the yarn on offer was a bit uninspiring. Or that the yarn was lovely, but the presentation was lacklustre. “If you're into knitting, when you go somewhere new, you always find the yarn shop. But sometimes I’d go in and wonder: why don't they make it look nicer in here? I guess I had a bit of a grouch in my head saying why don't you do it like that?”
Around about the same time, a neighbour of Anna’s said to her, jokingly, “you had better open that wool shop you always talk about soon otherwise someone else is going to open it” and in that moment, she realised she would be really upset if somebody else opened one in her neigbourhood. So she took herself off to some business planning classes provided by Hackney Council “…and they took me seriously! I momentarily stepped into the shoes of somebody who had a plan. I realised I could do it. I realised, if this person can start a gardening business, and that person can open a café, and that person turn their passion for making clothes into a business, why shouldn't I open a shop?”
There were around two years between Anna taking the City & Guilds course and the shop opening, but she thinks it was six months between realising that there was a wool shop-shaped hole in Clapton, and actually making the offer on the empty premises: “I don't know that it would have worked like that everywhere, but there is a really nice sense of community amongst the people who live [in Clapton]. They gave the shop the benefit of the doubt. And it's not just about the shop speaking to the community, it's as though the community really spoke to the shop. It is a dynamic relationship”.
We couldn’t talk about Anna’s shop and not discuss the ever changing, magical window displays that she comes up with. My two daughters absolutely love them and whenever there's a new one, they're immediately rushing over to look. They always beckon you in. But Anna says that she wasn’t very good at merchandising at the start: “It's a really special skill. People train to do it, or they have a gift for it. And however I rearranged the products in the window, it never worked. Then one day, Sean, the acupuncturist [next door] asked me if I wanted the old bicycle that had been left behind by the barber who was in there before him. He thought I’d like it for a display. And I thought, I'm going to stop trying to arrange balls of wool beautifully in the window, I'm going to put a knitted bicycle in there instead”.
She continues “at that time there was a bike shop on Mare Street called London Field Cycles and Barley Massey from Fabrications used to do their window displays. They were so fantastic and she always used found objects from the bike shop to construct all these weird and wonderful scenes. I was so inspired by them, and I thought let me take this old broken bike and see what I can do…. I wrapped it in wool and hung it in the window, it looked great, and I realised this is how I should do it. If the window tells a story, then it works.
“You know, our shops are part of the built environment of the street. We’re making the environment that the community lives in, and we have an obligation to make it nice. And there are so many people, maybe they don't know anything about knitting, but they’re tempted to come in. They just want to look around”. Anna says the shop is a like a goldfish bowl – she enjoys watching the same people coming and going each day “and I do feel like it's a sort of special secret, a sort of tickle, to see the people walking past with kids who were babies not long ago. Or sometimes it's that they were pregnant when I opened!”.
Back to the windows - Hana Sunny Whaler is often involved in Anna’s window displays and has played a big part in the store’s branding. They have a long and very successful working relationship. When I interviewed Hana for The Worshipful two years ago, she told me she felt as though she and Anna really understood one another, which I loved.
Anna recalls that Jo of local bookshop, Pages, discovered Hana originally. She was working on a display for them and Anna was taken by how beautifully she painted the window. The first thing she painted for Anna was the Elizabeth Zimmerman quote that you will still find on the side window, to the right of the door: “Properly practiced, knitting soothes the troubled spirit and it doesn’t hurt the untroubled spirit, either”. Since then, Anna and Hana’s working relationship has developed, with Hana taking on the visual branding. For a store with original period features, that sells the tools and materials for making things by hand, having signage painted by hand using traditional techniques, is surely a match made in heaven.
I asked Anna if she has any rituals: “Brönte always comes and makes coffee for us both in the morning. I really like that. I always come in quite early and spend a good hour pottering about. I need that. And I do a Pilates class once a week. But on that day, when I get to the shop, I have to hit the ground running and while I enjoy doing the class, that day is always a bit challenging because I haven't had my pottering about time. I am very chaotic and messy, so I like that time for sorting things out. Also, I cook when I get home. I feel like there's something about turning my head away from the business and immersing it in making something else. Marking the end of my working day”.
On the challenges of running an independent business, Anna says that the thing she struggles with the most is the myriad hats you’re required to wear “there are so many different areas of expertise that go into running a business, and I don't have all of them at all. I really, really love being with people and helping them out with their knitting or choosing their yarn. But I'm not good at the financial and admin side of things. It's no joke if you haven't done your tax return on time, you know? I've worked hard to put systems in place in order to be better at doing all those things”.
We discussed the importance of not shying away from the fact that the success of any business is marked by it staying afloat financially. It seems so obvious, and yet we can all get bogged down by the brand, the product or managing a social media profile. But without profit, you don’t have a business in the first place: “it's great to be passionate about what you do, but that's not enough. You must make a plan, and you have to make more money than you spend”.
Social media is another story. Like many of us who have not grown up with smart phones, Anna says she feels resistant to going all-in on self-promotion. Her way of mitigating this is to write a newsletter, which goes out to her subscribers (catch up with them here). Almost like an essay, each week she tells stories, does a round-up of patterns or talks about a yarn producer that she’s discovered and likes. Planning this newsletter is a big part of her week. Occasionally she struggles to come up with an idea, but recently did a very enjoyable profile piece on her and Brönte, which was a rare concession to the aforementioned act of self-promotion. You can read it here.
But a fundamental element of running a business well, is to find good people that you get on with. The secret of Wild & Woolly, Anna thinks, can be partly attributed to Gregor Timlin who designed the shop’s interior as well as Brönte, Hana with her windows and branding, and Wendy Peterson (who teaches regularly in the shop), as well as Helen at The Wool Kitchen.
Anna’s favourite thing about running the shop is the people – “I love it when customers come in and they bring the things they've made or that they're they are making, and sometimes there's almost a midwife role that I play. I'm not doing the making, but it's wonderful to have been allowed in, to help choose the yarn, pick up the dropped stitches and say, yes! You can do it. It’s lovely to be able to empower people”.
When I asked Anna which women have captured her attention recently, she didn’t hesitate:
“There's a woman who set up a business making yarn in Catalonia, in Spain, not too far from Barcelona, called Elena Solier. Her brand is called Xolla. She was moved to start producing yarn from sheep in her local area and I asked her how she found the people to supply the wool and she said, well, I went to the school of shepherds. I thought her English must be wrong, but I looked it up and there literally is a school of shepherds in Catalonia. So she found shepherds to supply the wool, then contacted a local mill and dyeing studio, so that they would dye the colours that resonated for her, from her time as a plant dyer. I think you really can feel in the wool that it’s been made by somebody who's taken so much care.
Then there’s Rosa Pomar, who's a longer-standing yarn producer. “She was obstinate with the mill owners about her idea of making wool from Portuguese sheep. They said don't be ridiculous, all the wool comes from New Zealand, but she was stubborn about it and they relented, and she's made a huge success of it. To me, she's a role model and it's interesting that so many of these yarn producers, especially in Europe, are women. Women with a determined vision”.
Anna goes on to talk about pattern designers that have stood apart for her lately, who are doing more radical things with design. Anna Husemann has written a book about using intarsia, which has been quite a divisive knitting technique in the past “but she's this young woman in Hamburg who went to art school and really got into collage, and her design practice is almost Matisse-like. She discovered that knitted fabric was a really good canvas for her designs. When you find someone in the knitting world who's doing something different, it's really exciting and refreshing. So she's been quite exciting to me, to see how she's working with fibre and colour and so on”. Anna also rates Alice Hoyle, a designer based in Amsterdam whose book “Knit” was published towards the end of last year and features modern but very wearable designs.
Speaking of books – when I asked Anna if she had any dream projects she would one day like to fulfill, she told me she’s already doing it: “I'm writing a book! I'm working on it with a knitwear designer in Lewisham called Fabienne Gassman. We’re going to call it Fancy Goods [if you know, you know]. It’s been a really long time in my head and now it's finally happening”.
I know it’ll be a beautiful book, because anything to do with Anna is always so well executed.
It’s becoming less and less common to drop into a local shop to get specialist advice, but we should make use of it where we can. Going to your butcher to ask for the best cut of meat for a certain recipe or asking your local independent book store for tips on what paperback you should check out next, these are small quotidian joys. It’s no different with Wild & Woolly – you can stop by, any time, with your knitting or crochet problem and either Anna or Brönte will be on hand to help you. And there’s almost always someone else in there whenever I drop in, so then they’ll chime in, too. And before you know it your colour choices for your next knit have become a team effort. The internet is a resource few of us can be without and it makes the world a smaller place, but there’s no substitute for in-person interactions like this – and the enthusiasm is infectious.
Wild and Woolly is at 116 Lower Clapton Road. Visit the website here (where you can also sign up to Anna’s newsletter) and check out the Instagram here.
