When Justine Tiu and her husband, Adrian Zhang, launched The Woobles out of a basement five years ago, they had no way of knowing that the simple act of teaching beginning crafters how to crochet tiny animals would become a multimillion-dollar business almost overnight.
“Our Wooble kits help people achieve something they once thought was impossible, and that in turn makes people feel super excited, grateful, and accomplished,” Justine says.
In some cases, learning to crochet Woobles gives people a new lease on life.
Justine recalls a customer who was mentally and physically impaired following brain cancer surgery.
“She was so excited to receive her Wooble kit because it helped improve her hand-eye coordination, plus she got to practice her math skills with all the counting involved in crocheting. It was the best activity she’d found to aid in her recovery.”
Not all the customer reviews are that dramatic, Justine says, but many new crocheting fanatics claim The Woobles have changed their lives.
Through it all, no one’s life has changed more than Justine’s.
Justine Tiu and Adrian Zhang. Contributed photo.
Around 2016, when she was still early in her career as a user experience designer at Google, she found herself navigating burnout after moving into a management role that didn’t align with her interests or strengths. She felt creatively stagnant and stuck in a career that no longer resonated with her.
Looking for rejuvenation and a boost of confidence, Justine immersed herself in the Japanese art of amigurumi — crafting small stuffed creatures out of yarn. It made learning a new skill feel like fun and reflected her love of cute things and small animals.
“Picking up crochet reminded me of what it felt like to be capable of doing something new again,” she says. “And learning amigurumi was a much more motivating project for me than making a blanket or a wearable.”
Today, her journey is a master class in the art of taking a soothing hobby to the next level and building a cultural phenomenon — one tiny handcrafted animal at a time.
Both Justine and Adrian are graduates of Duke University, where Justine majored in electrical engineering, visual arts, and German. Adrian studied biomedical engineering and economics. They started their careers in New York City and moved home to North Carolina in 2020. They have two young children.
Contributed photo
The couple launched The Woobles out of Justine’s parents’ basement in 2020, investing $200 in materials. By 2023 they had expanded into a warehouse in Cary and had 20 employees.
Today, the $5 million business has 50 employees. The Wooble kits are crafted in China and shipped to customers around the world out of a warehouse in Durham. Justine reckons Woobles have taught over a million people how to crochet.
She reflects on the early days, when the work was all hands-on and she and Adrian wore all the hats. They created their own Shopify site, designed their own ads, personally answered every customer service email and phone call, and shipped every package by hand. It was a 24/7 job.
“We hand spun yarn around a felt-tipped pen to make the yarn balls that would go into the kits, and we hand stamped cloth bags to hold them,” she says.
“We did every scrappy thing we could to save money, learn what it takes to build a business, and scale up as fast as we could.”
A hallmark of The Woobles’ business model is its series of tutorial videos. Each design comes with a card bearing a code that unlocks the coordinating tutorial, giving crocheters a step-by-step guide to the process. Justine records the videos herself, and her audience loves them.
“I used to film the videos in my parents’ unfinished basement late at night to maximize silence, but if someone flushed the toilet, the plumbing would come through loud and clear, so I’d text to let them know when they could take bathroom breaks,” she says. “I once got a message from someone telling me that my crochet teaching voice is so soothing that her hedgehogs wander out of their burrows every time they hear our videos playing.”
Justine credits her customer base with turning her business into a crowd-pleasing success and teaching her how to improve her practices and products.
Contributed photo
“That’s how we unintentionally turned a hobby into a business,” she says. “Opportunities kept opening up new opportunities, and we felt the need to make the most of the traction we were seeing.”
In 2023, the business was boosted by a winning appearance on Shark Tank and publishing Crochet Amigurumi, a book that ranks as Amazon’s top seller in the toy-making category.
To build their product line, Justine and Adrian began entering licensing partnerships with beloved companies and titles like Sanrio, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Minecraft.
“These are iconic brands with rich storytelling, strong visual identities, and multigenerational fan bases, making them perfect for transformation into accessible crochet projects,” Justine says.
There’s something to be said for letting products speak for themselves, especially when they are called Woobles.
“The original Woobles designs were two-legged animals with one continuous head, neck, and body, tubby bellies, and stumpy arms and legs,” Justine explains. “My sister looked at them and said they were ‘woobly,’ and the name stuck.”
While Justine could easily have designed the Wooble characters and sold them as fully formed toys, her joy comes in teaching others the craft. After all, creating an amazing user experience and building a sense of community have always been her super powers.
“We have a very active Facebook community of over 200,000 Wooblers who like to share all the Woobles they’ve made and their modifications to Woobles patterns,” she says. “And they enjoy looking to the community for advice and support when it comes to all things wooblin’.
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