Yesterday I learned, along with the rest of the scrapbooking community, that Two Peas in a Bucket is closing. If you aren't familiar with Two Peas, it's a scrapbooking webite that includes a forum, a gallery, video tutorials and a shop full of scrapbooking supplies.
This site closing is a big deal. Of all the scrapbooking websites, Two Peas is very well known and also very popular. The members of their design team, the Garden Girls, are well respected and very talented. The fact that this site can't survive doesn't bode well for the rest of the industry (with the exception of Project Life, which I'll get to in a minute).
Many of the small, local scrapbooking stores have closed, including the one that I used to visit. Just recently Archivers, a very popular bricks + mortar chain scrapbooking store, closed. I'm not too surprised that scrapbooking stores are struggling because of the ease of shopping online, but hearing that a popular online shop is closing is more surprising to me.
In my opinion one of the reasons sales of scrapbooking products are diminishing is because of the success of Project Life. If you aren't familiar with Project Life it is a pocket style of scrapbooking that involves simply slipping photos into pockets. You can also add embellished journaling cards and papers into the pockets which gives crafters the opportunity to be creative, but the concept of Project Life is based on simplicity with less focus on "stuff" and more focus on perserving memories through photos and words.
Becky Higgins, one of the pioneers in the scrapbooking industry, created Project Life and she's done a great job of marketing the products and the concept. It's popularity has created a shift in the supplies scrapbookers purchase, and I think that has led to the demise of so many scrapbooking stores.
I don't think scrapbooking hobby is going away any time soon, even though sales of products are currently down. In fact, I think that there will be a resurgence of "old school" scrapbooking in the next few years as the hype and excitement around Project Life wanes. Already many of the big names in scrapbooking are incorporating more traditional scrapbooking into their crafting because they miss the creativity that comes with creating full sized layouts.
The scrapbooking hobby has evolved over the years, from the early days when the only company that sold products was Creative Memories to the current state. It will be interesting to watch and to see what the next big idea will be.
