Sometimes the best business decisions start with borderline reckless spending. That's what happened when Abby Price dropped $15,000 on a professional embroidery machine "on a total whim" in 2022, three years after launching her home decor business Abbode while studying at Parsons School of Design.
Price had no idea if the investment would pay off. She didn't have the space or experience to use it regularly, so the expensive machine ended up doing what expensive impulse purchases often do: collecting dust in the basement.
The Weekend That Changed Everything
Fast forward to early 2023. The holiday rush had ended, and Price needed to take the machine out for professional servicing anyway. So she and co-owner Daniel Kwak decided to host a two-day embroidery event at the shop, offering free stitching to customers just to see what would happen.
What happened was chaos, in the best possible way.
"That weekend, I knew I had something special on my hands. I knew that nothing was going to be the same," Price told CNBC. "I was just really early to a trend."
It took an entire week to work through the orders placed during those two days. Kwak, who'd started working at Abbode in 2022 and became co-owner in 2023, immediately recognized the opportunity and pushed Price to lean into embroidery full force.
Pivoting at Exactly the Right Moment
Over the next year, Abbode systematically transformed its business model. The company phased out home decor inventory and shifted toward customizable embroidered products and embroidery services, both in-store and online.
The numbers tell the story. Sales jumped from $719,000 in 2023 to $1.59 million in 2024. This year, Price expects Abbode to hit $4 million in revenue.
Despite those impressive figures, the company operates on thin profit margins, Kwak explained to CNBC. Right now the focus isn't maximizing profitability—it's building brand recognition and expanding revenue streams.
That strategy includes hosting pop-up embroidery events around the world with major brands like L.L. Bean, the Ritz-Carlton, and Charlotte Tilbury. These branded partnerships now generate about 25% of total revenue, according to CNBC.
Growth Born From Anxiety
Interestingly, the decision to host that first pivotal embroidery pop-up came from a place of stress, not strategy.
"As the business grew, I feel like the problems also grew," Price told CNBC. "I was constantly investing in things, more employees, more inventory, this embroidery machine. It all just sort of started to catch up with me."
"I was feeling so overwhelmed and stressed because I knew something had to change here," she continued.
So when they hauled the machine out of the basement that spring, the pop-up was partly an experiment and partly a desperate attempt to make use of an expensive piece of equipment gathering cobwebs.
Riding the Wave Forward
Price and Kwak acknowledge that luck played a role in their success. Being early to a trend, having the machine ready when demand emerged, and being willing to pivot quickly all mattered.
But they're confident Abbode can adapt as consumer tastes shift. The embroidery business model is flexible enough to evolve with whatever comes next.
"We can take any ethos and emotion behind anything and turn it into embroidery," Price says. "Really just sky's the limit."
