A recent academic paper - Knitting Community: Human and Social Capital in the Early Transition into Entrepreneurship - covers research on the process hobby knitters go through to decide to turn their hobby into a business.
The study found that many of the hobbyists that started a knitting business had been encouraged to do so by people they knew, such as husbands, friends and other knitters.
The research was based on digging through the data at the knitting community site Ravely.com, which is known as the "Facebook for knitters".
Key quote from a Washington Post article on the study:
...analyzed almost 100 interviews and 403,168 profiles of knitters and crocheters. She found that even on one of the Internet’s great niche social networks, offline encouragement and feedback helped most talented hobbyists recognize their ability and take the first steps toward monetizing it. Success on the Internet was propelled by real-life interactions.
The in-person networking that was found to be most effective at encouraging entrepreneurship was membership in a Stitch n' Bitch group.
These are formal or informal knitters clubs where members meet, knit, socialize and share knitting advice. Again from the Washington Post:
People who joined a so-called “stitch n’ bitch” group to craft socially were 25 percent more likely than otherwise identical knitters to take the plunge into entrepreneurship. This is true even when correcting for geography, experience, skill level and productivity.
We've long studied the shift from hobbyist to hobbypreneur. It's clearly a growing source of new and especially part-time small businesses.
See the 2009 Inuit research brief Today's Hobbyists are Tomorrow's Hobbypreneurs for more on this topic. We worked with Intuit on this report and while the research is 9 years old, we think the findings are still relevant.
BTW and not particularly relevant is yes, AI is starting to be used in knitting. See the Atlantic's SkyKnit: How an AI Took Over an Adult Knitting Community for more on this.
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