What’s In Store For 2025 From The Jaftex Companies?

Happy New Year Everyone! I hope 2024 was a great year for you, but I hope that 2025 will be even better. I am excited about 2025 because Jaftex will be celebrating its 95th anniversary which dates back to the time when my great-grandfather Jacob A. Fortunoff (JAF in Jaftex) started selling/jobbing fabrics from a cart through the streets of New York.

Speaking of New York and what’s in store for Jaftex in 2025, we are moving our New York offices to a new location with an open floor plan and lots of natural light. After over 20 years in the same location, it is time for a refresh. As much as moving is one of my most hated life tasks, it’s time for us to move so we can revitalize our team. On that note, the Fabric Editions team, the customer service team and the credit team, located in Greenville, SC will all be moving to a new location as well. The good news is that we will be paying less rent which is especially helpful since everything else we do is going up in price.

Let me tell you a little bit more about some of the other highlights coming in 2025:

Branding Initiative: When FreeSpirit was purchased in 2018, I learned the importance of branding as FreeSpirit is a master at that. On the other hand, our New York companies, being old-school as they are, lacked good branding. As such, I am excited to announce that we hired a marketing/branding person, Lili, late last year. I can not wait until her initiatives are put into practice. I am very optimistic about this!

With the branding initiative, we will be implementing new websites for all the Jaftex Companies. We are also redoing the logos, colors and so much more. We will all have to wait and see how this plays out. I look forward to seeing how Lili brings new life to the New York Jaftex companies while also tying all the brands together in a cohesive way to tell a fabulous generational family textile story.

ESOP: As mentioned in a recent blog, last year, we turned Jaftex into an ESOP. The long and the short of that is that our employees now own a portion of the business. With the ownership, the employees will now have a more vested interest in the success of the business. As such, I expect this to be another positive benefit to the companies and the employees.

New Designers: We are always seeking out new designers. In fact, FreeSpirit is making 2025 the year of the designer as they have embarked on adding several new licensed designers to the roster. Many of them have already been introduced, but there are more coming. I think many of you will be surprised on this front, but let’s just leave it at that until the big reveals are made public. In addition to what FreeSpirit is doing to promote new designers, our other brands will be introducing new designers and seeking out new ones too. If you know someone who is talented with valuable experience or someone who is not happy where they currently are working, please let me know.

New FreeSpirit 2-Year Catalog: The FreeSpirit team will be introducing a new 2-year reorder catalog. This catalog is the FreeSpirit bible containing their most popular designs from their most preeminent designers including the likes of Tula Pink, the Kaffe Fassett Collective, Tim Holtz, Morris & Co., Sue Penn, Sew Kind of Wonderful and many others. By the way, have you seen the newest Kaffe X Morris Fabric? It’s amazing! Here’s a little taste below.

New Products: I am always seeking out new items for our reps to sell. As you know, last year we started to distribute the Renaissance Ribbon brand. This year, I expect the ribbon to pick up the pace and start to gain traction as more shops realize we are offering the ribbon by several of the FreeSpirit designers. The added perk for the ribbon is that we will ship it with the matching fabric. This is a no-brainer and an added convenience for our valued customers. Oh yeah, and the ribbon ships freight free too.

Another new item for 2025 includes batiks which Jaftex hasn’t offered in quite some time. The Blank Quilting Corp. has teamed up with Chris Hill, a batik expert from Australia. He has designed his own line of batiks that he sells in Australia. We will now be importing those to offer them to our customers. One thing to mention is that Chris has some amazing projects to inspire consumers with ideas as to what to make with the new Indonesian batiks that will be offered in 10-yard bolts. Below you can see the 2 first batik ranges and a sample of one of the projects.

Seeking Acquisitions: In spite of not being a part of any acquisitions in 2024, we are always seeking out new opportunities and acquisitions. With so many changes going on in the industry and lots of long-term executives looking to retire, it seems that some new opportunities will present themselves. If not, we will continue on full steam ahead. It always helps us to make acquisitions since our sales tend to slowly trend down year-over-year….that’s the nature of our industry. An acquisition is always a great way to buy more needed sales to add to the bottom line while being able to reduce overhead by cutting duplicative roles. We shall see…..

Adding Distributors: The Jaftex Companies have many great traveling sales reps who have been loyal to us for many years. The thing is that it is pretty difficult for these reps to cover every single shop in their territory, not to mention shops that can’t buy due to financial constraints among other reasons. In any case, in an effort to maximize the distribution for Jaftex, we made two moves over the last year.

For one, The Blank Quilting Corp. added these distributors to their roster: Checker, E.E. Schenck, Needlecraft & Foust. For Blank, this has proven to be a great move thus far. Starting in 2025, FreeSpirit will be adding two distributors to their roster. Namely, Checker and E.E. Schenck. I think this will end up being a great decision too that will help to increase the FreeSpirit market share and overall distribution to all corners of the US.

Simplified Pricing: For 2025, since 44/45″ digital print pricing is getting closer to the traditional print pricing, we are moving to a single price for both digital and traditional printing. This will help to simplify things as we always like to keep it simple for our customers. We have also simplified the pricing for 108″ and 118″ in many cases, but not all. Again, a single price, rather than multiple price points.

Shows We Will Be Attending: You can count on Jaftex members being at all these shows this year: Sewposium run by Karen Montgomery in Florida. H&H in Chicago. QuiltCon in Arizona. Quilt Market in Houston. Hope to see you there!

Unfortunately, there are some negatives on the horizon for 2025, but nothing too bad that I can see thus far. Here are a few:

We Will Not Be Selling Sykel: If you haven’t heard, Sykel was recently bought by Benartex. The Jaftex sales reps sold the Sykel lines, but since the purchase by Benartex, we have been asked to stop selling the line. This is not a huge loss as this was something we distributed more based on convenience for our customers. In the end, we didn’t sell a ton. Long story short, this is not a huge loss at all. Rather, it is probably a bigger negative for our customers who won’t have the convenience of buying it from our reps.

No More Blogs: If you enjoy reading my blogs, this will be a negative for you as I plan to slow down my blogging to refocus my energies elsewhere. No offense, but this is a positive for me. I want some of my life back as writing a weekly blog is a time suck especially on Sunday nights. Interesting because it is Sunday at 714 PM right now. LOL! I have been blogging since 2012 so I need a break. My blog page will likely contain less consistent blog posts i.e. not every week. In addition, the blogs I do will be less cookie-cutter and more about current events. From what I hear, readers seem to want more of the current event blog posts as opposed to the methodical blogs like my favorite shipping lines for the month and what is in the latest release offering. When the people speak, Scott Fortunoff listens.

Challenge Reset: I have been hosting several challenges for the last 7 years or so i.e. #ScottSentMe and the Jaftex Facebook Live Video Challenge to name two. These challenges have run their course and peaked out. I will take the hint and move on to something new. Stay tuned for some newness in the future….I just need to figure something out that will be worthwhile.

Tariffs & Uncertainty: Without making this political in any way, with a new president there are a lot of changes on the horizon. As such, there is a lot of uncertainty that could work for or against the textile industry. For example, we know that tariffs have the potential to disrupt the textile industry, but it’s too early to say if tariffs will be applied to places like South Korea & Pakistan where we buy the majority of our fabrics. My fingers are crossed that our industry doesn’t get caught up in the crosshairs of tariffs or any political wrangling.

Stores Closing: There is always the risk of shops closing as more and more retailers continue to near retirement age among other reasons to retire or sell the shop. But in addition, the big box fabric retailers aren’t looking great, especially Joann’s. Recall, we lost Fabric.com and the Hancock Fabric Chain not too long ago. As much as many of the quilt shop owners would like to see Joann’s go, I have a different theory. I am a believer that fewer fabric resellers equals fewer quilters. Therefore, the more large retailers we lose, the more quilters we lose. That is just my theory, but I am sticking to it. It’s the old sewing begets more sewing theory. What do you think about that?

There you have it folks. This is what we are looking at in 2025! I am sure there will be so much more, but I hope you like the direction we are going with all these initiatives and such. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Peace!