Signature Needle Arts

What do we have in common? Challenging times and a desire to climb under a rock until things are settled. 

Not in common: I have a wonderful husband! No tattoos or girlfriends—with or without tattoos.

The challenge for everyone here at Signature has been those darn circular needles.

As you know when we started Signature our single points and double points have been successful beyond my wildest dreams because customers LOVE them. . From the manufacturing end it was no problem to make fabulous products. BUT, everywhere we went and in daily emails we heard…”and when will you do circulars?” 

Even though I am one of the tiny minority who, by choice, never use them I recognized that there was a huge percent of people who never use anything but circulars.

We can all laugh at our first attempts—we call them the “Frankenstein needles”.

We have been refining the design and fixing some issues with the first batch and the new design is quite different. What we didn’t do at first—and this was complete hubris on our part– was to do enough testing.

Now we have assembled a group of testers who were chosen because we felt they would be honest, and even brutal, if they had to be. As a side note: it was not easy finding people who like us and our products that but who would be scrupulously honest even if they found issues. The results are in, but even those testers don’t know that what they tested and really liked have been even further refined.

We have tried so many different things and one of the most heart-wrenching was seeing our shop floor manager, the person who did all the drawings, and one of our best machinists in my office bringing me the “latest and greatest” and me having to once again say, “Sorry this is not good enough.” I knew that they were all SO stressed out wanting to find the solutions we were looking for but which were so elusive. So many days we went home feeling very discouraged but somehow we came back to try again and again and again.

Many of you have met Paul Bothe at shows and I have asked him to help fill you all in on what we have been doing:

It’s funny that Cathy chose to compare our “issues” with the circular needles to Sandra Bullock’s recent troubles.  When Cathy showed us her introduction, and asked us to write a few words, the first thing that came to my mind is that I, too, feel like Sandra Bullock.  In the 1994 movie, Speed.  In this otherwise forgettable film, Sandra Bullock plays a heroine who is unwillingly thrust into a situation in which the city bus she is riding on has been rigged by a villain to explode if, and only if, the bus reaches a speed less than 50 miles per hour. 

Like Sandra Bullock, we have been trying to keep the Signature Circular research and development at top speed while we try to iron out the issues that some of our customers have had regarding the functionality of our needles.  We have not ceased or slowed down since we first released the circulars, and we will not rest until we have something that is up to our standards and the standards of our customers. 

Since we at Signature have built our company around providing superior products in terms of functionality and aesthetics, we had to do the same when it came to our line of circulars.  We have been working long hours both night and day to improve our product, but a lot of the difficulty has come from our area of expertise and areas that were completely new to us.  As a long time manufacturer of CNC machined parts, the aluminum straight needles and DPNs came easy to us, since we know metal and how to make “things” out of metal.

However, from day one, we constantly heard, “These straight needles are great, but when will you have circulars?????”   Cathy mentioned a certain degree of hubris on our part in that we had a relatively easy time in creating and launching the straight needles and DPNs, and we somehow assumed it would be a breeze to create a superior set of circulars.  We were wrong.  Very Wrong. 

Many of you may use knitting needles every day, but probably do not have to consider how you would go about making them, or why the manufacturer makes certain decisions.  One of our priorities was to find a cable which was an improvement upon the stiff nylon cable found in some of  the circulars on the market.  Our PTFE (commonly known as Teflon) cable was just right for so many reasons…flexibility, lack of memory, resistance to kinking, low coefficient of friction, as well as aesthetics.  Unfortunately, the very traits that made this cable desirable made it very hard to work with.  Teflon is known not to stick to anything, right?  So we had to find a way to secure the Teflon cables  to our needles.  This alone caused us headaches, catalyzed arguments, and lead to days and weeks of manufacturing pains.  An easy way out would be to go with a stiffer cable, but we were committed to improving upon the circulars available in the marketplace.

Another issue we have been fighting with is the “join” area where the cable transitions to the needle.  In many ways the join is like a mattress: if it is working properly and doing its job, you might never notice it or think about it.  However, when it is bad and giving you discomfort it seems to become the only thing you can think about and is a constant source of annoyance.  For some knitters, the join became an issue that outweighed all other positive points of the Signature Needles.  From a manufacturing standpoint, the difference between what felt “good” versus what felt “bad” was only a matter of 2 ten thousandths of an inch (.0002”).  To put this tiny number in perspective, it would be like cutting a human hair lengthwise into 15 pieces.  The difference between a smooth and a rough transition came down to 1/15 of the thickness of a human hair.  Ouch! 

Luckily, even though we are a small company, we have the right machines and the best people to help create a superior product that will satisfy and please a vast majority of knitters.  We have admittedly become a little gun shy after our first  releases of the circulars, but we have finally arrived at a design which we believe will make our customers happy, and our testing has confirmed this. 

In many ways, this too has mirrored a Sandra Bullock movie: Hope Floats.  In this painfully sappy film, Bullock’s character is publicly humiliated and lambasted when her personal life becomes public in a small town in which gossip and word of mouth spread like a wildfire.  When we were receiving some negative word of mouth comments and complaints via sites like Ravelry, we felt like Bullock’s character, Birdie, who was publicly embarrassed and chided, but instead of a small town, the people whispering and screaming about Signature were the vocal and active knitters on Ravelry and other knitting sites.  Fortunately, if you can make it far enough into Hope Floats without getting nauseous, you will also learn from Birdie that if you “give hope a chance to float up..it will.”   We are finally confident in our product, and sincerely HOPING that you will love the newest rebirth of our Signature circulars as much as we do.

And so… drum roll please… here are the first official pictures of the circulars that we will have on the site very soon. Again, we will be starting with sizes 5, 6 and 7 with others to follow.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 26th, 2010 at 6:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.