Coined by former Estee Lauder chairman Leonard Lauder in the early 2000s, the "lipstick index" refers to an economic slowdown and people turning to small, affordable luxuries, such as lipstick and nail polish.
Well, we might not be in recession, yet, but the world is certainly reeling from a lot of uncertainty.
We're introducing 50g skeins of our most popular yarn base, Lady Persephone Sock as our "lipstick index".
Sometimes you don't need 100g skeins.
Your pattern might need a smaller amount.
You might want a contrast for heels and toes on your socks to eek out that 100-gram skein you have into two pairs of socks.
50-gram skeins are a small affordable luxury to mix and match with each other, to add smaller amounts of colour to a project, to put with your leftovers, as well as being a size that is still independently useful on its own.
50-grams are the absolute smallest weight that we will dye to sell and still cover our costs and wages.
We do pop smaller 20g skeins into our Yarn Cartel boxes as a treat but given how much more labour is required to go into skeins smaller than 100g, the price would be much higher than people are willing to pay for us to add to our yarn base lineup, given that we are an accredited Living Wage Foundation business.
A quick video from IGTV on Saturday 4th December 2020.
Video with audio transcript.
