Why We Don’t Collect Reviews

We are, I’ll admit, rather unusual these days in e-commerce for not collecting reviews. Everywhere you look, someone wants a star rating or a few glowing lines about your “experience”. But we’re not the only ones choosing not to. Some of the brands I buy from again and again, the ones I love the most, also often quietly opt out too. I’m sure that’s not accidental.

So I thought I’d explain why we don’t have reviews on our website.

Plenty of people have told us we’re mad. We have an incredibly high rate of returning customers, a very engaged community and a huge amount of loyalty. You only have to glance at the comments on our Instagram posts or YouTube videos to see how people feel about what we do. This became particularly clear when we started paid advertising for the first time last April. The people running our ads couldn’t quite believe we didn’t collect reviews, knowing how much it would help convert more customers. You can see why: adverts full of “10,000 five-star reviews” do tend to stop you scrolling. Hearing other people’s opinions is persuasive. I do tend to read reviews of things when I am buying them (albeit, it's hard to know sometimes whether they make a difference to my end decision). So when we have so much goodwill already, are we mad not to make more of it? Possibly. But there are a few reasons why we haven’t, and why I don’t see that changing any time soon.

For the first five years of running The Fabled Thread, I didn’t spend a penny on advertising. The business grew steadily through word of mouth - people buying our kits, telling their friends, and coming back for more. That same word of mouth also drove our PR. We’ve been featured in every major newspaper and magazine you can think of, not because of a big agency campaign, but because people were talking about what we do. When you’ve built a business that way, you don’t need to plaster the website with proof that people like what you make. It’s already there in how the business has grown.

These days you can barely walk down the street without being asked to review something. My inbox has around ten thousand unread emails (horrific, I know), and I’d bet half of them are “tell us how we did” messages. It’s relentless. I hate the thought of adding to that noise. When someone buys a kit from us, they’ve already shown us a lot of trust - they’ve given their time, their money, and their attention. I don’t want to then ask them to perform for us by writing a review afterwards. It feels like bad manners.

Part of this probably comes down to personal bias because I can’t stand writing reviews. I put it up there with the worst kind of admin. Even when I’ve absolutely loved something, I find the process of leaving a review utterly joyless. I’m far happier sending a personal thank-you email or telling my friends about a brilliant restaurant than trying to remember my login details for some review site. In fact, the only time I ever actually leave a review is when something has gone wrong. The company that sold me Sasha’s pram springs to mind - they managed to deliver only the cup holder and then stopped replying to my messages, so I left a review just to get their attention. It worked, but it sums up my point: review platforms tend to attract people who are cross, not the silent majority who are quietly content.

It takes years to build up the kind of review numbers that look impressive. Even if every one of your first hundred reviews is glowing, that small total can look less reassuring than none at all – you don’t see “100 five star reviews” plastered across ads. We’ve shipped around fifty thousand kits over the years, but that’s to fewer than ten thousand individual customers. That’s something I’m very proud of, but it’s not the sort of scale where you can suddenly show a huge bank of feedback. Realistically, it would take us years to build to a number that looks “trustworthy” to a stranger scrolling by, and until then it might have the opposite effect.

The world of online reviews is a murky one. Fake reviews are everywhere - bots leaving feedback, companies paying people to post praise, even “review swaps” between brands. The UK Competition and Markets Authority recently introduced new rules to try to crack down on this, forcing businesses to show whether a review has been incentivised or verified. That’s not a nice-to-have; it’s now law. When the government has to legislate for honesty, it tells you everything you need to know.

We’re not selling jeans, where you want to know if they come up small, or face cream, where you’re comparing dozens of near-identical options. We sell embroidery kits. They’re rather “one size fits all”. The questions you’re asking yourself before buying are: do I like the design, do I have time for this, and is it right for my skill level? For the first two, no stranger on the internet can answer that for you. And for the third, while a review might help a little, it doesn’t tell you much unless you know the person’s experience. Instead, we make videos showing the kits being made so you can judge for yourself. I don’t think necessarily think a written review will ever be the thing that decides whether you can do a kit.

Running an online shop is full of hidden costs. Your email platform, your hosting, your website maintenance - it all creeps up to thousands a month. Add a reviews platform to the list and it’s another monthly subscription to justify. Once you start adding up how many extra orders you’d need to make each month just to cover the cost of collecting and displaying reviews, it quickly stops making financial sense. Do I really believe the reviews drove those extra sales or would they have happened anyway. In all honesty, I’d much rather spend that money on developing new kits or improving what we already do.

The truth is that earlier this year we started running adverts for the first time (which I wrote about here), which means, for the first time, people are finding us cold. They haven’t been introduced by a friend or seen us in a magazine, they have just been shown an ad on Instagram or clicked a sponsored link on Google. So I completely understand why reviews might seem like the obvious next step. It’s natural to want that reassurance. But there are far better ways for us to show what we do.

You can look at the press we’ve had. We’ve been featured everywhere from Vogue to House & Garden, The Financial Times, World of Interiors and beyond - often more than once. That doesn’t happen by chance. Journalists don’t risk their credibility recommending things they don’t believe in.

You can also meet our customers. We may not have thousands of anonymous one-liners on Trustpilot, but we do have real people whose stories we’ve shared. You can watch Grace talk about how she’s moved from stitching our kits to creating her own designs, hear Cordelia explain how embroidery helped her post-partum, or see Gilly describe how stitching has become her perfect travel companion. We invite groups of our customers to the studio and record their stories. You can see their faces and hear their voices, which feels infinitely more real than a line of text saying “Loved it!”.

Then there’s us. You see more of the team behind The Fabled Thread than most brands ever show. Through my stitch-along videos, through Instagram stories showing the team packing kits or sending orders, through these kinds of very honest articles, we’re constantly showing you what we’re working on and why. There’s no smoke and mirrors, no “behind the curtain” mystery - you see it all.

And finally, you can always just speak to us. If you have questions about a kit or need to know what level of experience it requires, email us. You’ll probably hear back from Georgina, Esme, Izzy or Joanne, who will happily walk you through what to expect. You don’t need to trawl through pages of reviews to find out whether satin stitch is hard - you can just ask.

At the end of the day, we’ve got to where we are without collecting reviews, and I don’t see that changing. It’s not that I’m against feedback - quite the opposite. We get so much thoughtful, personal feedback through emails, social media, and conversations with customers that asking people to fill in boxes online feels unnecessary. The trust we’ve built has come through openness, honesty, and consistency, not through star ratings.

So while I completely understand the power of reviews, I’d rather focus on what we already know works for us - real relationships, word of mouth, and creating things that people genuinely love. That feels far more meaningful than chasing a perfect five-star score.