There’s no pattern for this

Jacqui Palhegyi comes from a family of sewists. Both of her grandmothers sewed, and her mom taught her when she was around eight or nine. She started with patchwork blankets and clothes for her dolls. In her 20s, she moved on to making her own clothes and learning to follow patterns. Along the way, she found a growing online community of sewists who shared ideas, techniques, and their work.

Years later, Jacqui opened Fringe Fabrics, bringing together her love of making clothes and the community she’d found online. The San Diego store carries sustainable, high-quality apparel fabrics, independent patterns, and sewing tools. “Sewing can be such a solitary activity,” she says. “Most people do it by themselves in their office or maybe even in the studio.” At Fringe Fabrics, customers talk through projects, learn from local instructors, and sometimes form friendships of their own. Building that community felt especially meaningful in the city she’d always imagined returning to.

Back home, something was missing

Jacqui grew up in San Diego, where her family’s roots go back generations. Her grandmother’s house in North Park has been in the family for around a century. After years in the Bay Area, Jacqui was itching to come home. 

When she returned, Jacqui found that many of the local fabric stores she remembered were gone. Yardage Town, a longtime community staple, had closed after the pandemic, leaving few places to shop for high-quality apparel fabric. Then she read a San Diego Union-Tribune article about the city’s disappearing fabric businesses. The article quoted a local sewing teacher who thought a new store could do well. Jacqui took it as the push she needed. “When I read that, I was like, ‘All right, it’s time. Time to do it,’” she says.

But opening the store meant walking away from a steady corporate career, and Jacqui found that prospect terrifying. The stability it provided had been especially important while she and her husband were starting a family. She didn’t leave until they had bought and furnished a house and she had built up enough savings and stock to help fund the business. Aside from a small loan, Jacqui funded Fringe Fabrics almost entirely herself.

“It is a huge risk, both financially and emotionally,” she says.

Jacqui had taken other risks before. She was the first person in her family to attend college. She taught high school for about five years, then moved into the corporate world without knowing exactly what she was doing. “I think there’s just been enough of those experiences in my life that make me feel confident and empowered to do something like this,” she says.

That confidence doesn’t keep her from questioning the decision. Some days, she wants to hide behind the counter and cry. Even then, she can’t think of anything she’d rather be doing. She gets to make the shop inviting, talk to people about fabric, and help customers find the right material for a project they’re excited about. “I go to bed every night feeling like I put in a hard day’s work,” she says. “And that feels really good.”

Owning it all without doing it all

Jacqui likes having control over her work, and running Fringe Fabrics lets her build something of her own and make the creative decisions herself. But it also makes her responsible for plenty of things she doesn’t know how to do yet.

There were permits to file, licenses to research, bills to pay, and processes to figure out without a clear guide. Even after Fringe Fabrics opened, Jacqui wasn’t convinced she’d handled everything correctly. “There’s no playbook for starting a small business at all,” she says. “I looked.”

Jacqui asked other business owners for advice and checked with neighboring shops when she wasn’t sure how to handle something. Still, her instinct was to figure things out herself. The store’s website helped change that. Jacqui built the site on Shopify, but a few back-end coding issues kept giving her trouble. After spending hours trying to solve them, she hired someone who specialized in online fabric stores. They fixed the problems far faster than she could have. 

The experience helped Jacqui realize she should be more selective about which problems she tries to solve herself. “Maybe I could figure this out, but I don’t have time,” she says. “I need to preserve my time—and my mental health in the process.”

Jacqui has kept that lesson in mind as the business has grown. She recently hired a sales associate, Jackson, who can run the store when she isn’t there. Before he joined, leaving during the day meant closing the shop. Now she can step out for lunch or get some air without shutting the doors. He’s also become someone she can talk to about the business. They discuss store logistics, creative ideas, fashion, and the social platforms Jacqui wants to use more. “Now I feel like I have a creative partner, which is awesome,” she says.

Jacqui also works with three instructors who teach classes at the shop. She hopes that circle will continue to grow, even if not everyone is a formal employee. She likes knowing there are people she can call. “Knowing that we have each other’s backs” is one of the most valuable parts of a community, she says. “You’re not totally doing it alone.”

Good news gets expensive

Fringe Fabrics offers beginner sewing classes, garment-focused workshops, and a visible mending class. Participants bring in torn or damaged clothing and learn to repair it with patches and Sashiko stitching. They leave with a garment that’s usable again and has become its own small piece of art. The class sells out whenever Jacqui offers it.

Classes aren’t the only way customers connect at Fringe Fabrics. Some spend an hour or two choosing fabric or talking through a project. Jacqui believes that personal attention is one reason they recommend the store and leave positive reviews. Those relationships have made the business more meaningful to her, but they’ve also given her more to lose.

When Fringe Fabrics first opened, Jacqui told herself that businesses fail all the time. She wanted it to work, but she knew she’d be okay if it didn’t. Now the possibility of failure feels heavier. “We have such a strong community of customers,” she says. “It does feel like I’d be letting down a larger community and not just myself.”

That pressure often comes back to money. Jacqui’s initial goal was for the store to pay for itself within its first year. It now covers its day-to-day costs, though she still uses savings for additions like the workshop space and sewing machines. Now she’s figuring out how to start paying herself, bring on another employee, and carry enough inventory to meet customer demand.

Popular fabrics already sell out quickly because Jacqui can only afford to stock them in small quantities. With more capital, she could offer more of what customers are asking for and expand into lace, sequins, organza, and other fabrics for bridal and evening wear. She’d also like to create a structured sewing curriculum and an online community where people can take classes, share their work, and stay connected to Fringe Fabrics even if they don’t live nearby. The ideas aren’t the hard part. Finding the money to support them is.

Looking for a way out of “Excel hell”

Jacqui was using Shopify to manage the store’s inventory, sales, and customer information, but expenses and bookkeeping still lived in spreadsheets. “Right now I’m in Excel hell,” she said. “That’s a problem that needs to be solved, like, yesterday.”

Tax season pushed Jacqui to become more regimented about tracking expenses, but she still wanted a clearer view of the business throughout the year instead of piecing everything together all at once.

QuickBooks was already on Jacqui’s radar, but she hadn’t signed up yet. After a year spent figuring out nearly every part of the store, another tool felt like one more thing to learn. Cost was part of the calculation too, especially for a business where every expense added up.

She wanted a clearer view of the money coming in and going out, along with help identifying expenses she didn’t need and places where the business might be losing money. “Every little subscription, every little fee, it all adds up,” she said.

She also wanted more confidence that forms, deadlines, and other details weren’t getting lost in the shuffle, so she could avoid what she called the “wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night, heart-pounding fear” of wondering, “Where did I drop the ball?” Having that information in one place, she hoped, would leave her with more time and mental energy for the work she valued most. “I would be able to focus on the parts of the business that I truly value,” she said, “which is kind of the creative ideation element.”

Jacqui has since become a QuickBooks customer, joining many small business owners seeking greater visibility and support as the financial side of their business grows more complex.

Something real to build on

For Jacqui, sewing works both sides of her brain. She can imagine a finished piece, choose a direction, and plan the details. Then she gets to work with the fabric itself, cutting it, moving it through the machine, and watching the idea become something real.

The process can be frustrating. She admits there’s plenty of cursing. But there’s also reassurance in having a pattern to return to. “As long as I keep going back to the directions, back to the pattern, back to this established thing, it’s going to come out right,” she says. That feeling is especially welcome when so much about business and life remains unpredictable.

Fringe Fabrics doesn’t come with the same kind of instructions. Jacqui is still figuring out what comes next and where she could use more support. But after a year, the store is covering its daily operating costs. Customers are finding the fabric they couldn’t find elsewhere in San Diego, classes are filling up, and a larger team is beginning to form around the work. There’s still plenty Jacqui wants to build. Now she knows she doesn’t have to do it alone.