What’s the last craft project that you took on? Pasting glitter on a Valentine’s Day card, trying your hand at pottery, or casting on a new sweater? Studies show that 72% of Americans completed a craft project in the past year, and that percentage keeps on rising as more of us return to traditional hobbies.
Spellbinders is a paper crafts supplier, part of a market worth over $48 billion in 2025. They’re known for specialized, premium products such as die-cutting machines that can cut, emboss, and stencil all in one. They’ve also worked hard to engage customers through a rewards program, a craft education hub, and monthly members’ clubs for specific skills and projects.
However, Spellbinders faces two key challenges. Crafting is a competitive, cost-conscious market where independent suppliers are up against online retailers and big craft stores. Every sale counts. And – with a huge product catalog, and a wealth of expertise to share – Spellbinders needs to make sure that customers find the right product at the right time.
Spellbinders looked to Wyng for new ways to inspire customers to purchase, personalize their online store, and improve product discoverability. Here’s how Wyng is able to help – with a sprinkle of magic from zero-party data and user-generated content (UGC).
Building Relationships with User-Generated Content
Spellbinders’ strategy starts with UGC from social media platforms. Their customers’ craft projects are the best possible advert, so why not use them to showcase products and inspire sales?
The craft supplier uses Wyng to collect, organize, and moderate posts that tag Spellbinders or use any of its hashtags. On average, Spellbinders captures over 6,000 pieces of UGC each month.
“They’ve been pulling in this content from Instagram, pretty much since they’ve been working with Wyng,” explains Greg Smart, a Solutions Engineer at Wyng. “It’s just kind of going on in the background… [as] an evergreen UGC program.”
Spellbinders displays galleries of UGC on their homepage and product detail pages to show products and supplies in use. Wyng’s advanced tools for UGC – including dynamic filters at display time – mean Spellbinders can optimize each gallery, selecting the highest-performing content and adding shoppable product links for easy add-to-cart.
But that’s just the beginning. Spellbinders also uses Wyng to engage shoppers and drive sales through preference-based personalization.
Driving Sales with Personalized Content
Spellbinders has a complex and growing audience. Each crafter has their own special interests: for example, someone who loves foil embossing might skip straight past a page about creating wax seals.
While their original UGC program with Wyng was a success, the craft supplier wanted to try additional strategies to drive sales. Therefore, personalising the web experience for each customer became top priority.
Wyng helped Spellbinders to create a custom preference center for their shoppers. The preference center is protected by a secure login integrated with Shopify and captures zero-party data about each shopper’s crafting interests, favorite brands, communication preferences, and more.
Once a customer indicates their preferences in the preference center, Spellbinders customizes the browsing experience on the website to highlight brands and projects they know the customer will love. For example, when browsing category pages they see recommended products and links to match their favorite crafts and styles.
“Spellbinders is kind of like Wyng,” Greg jokes. “They offer so many things [that] if you don’t know what you’re looking for, it can be overwhelming. Part of [the zero-party data strategy] was solving that problem.”
Combining The Power of Customer Data and User-Generated Content
Once the original personalization program was up and running, Wyng suggested taking things even further. What if Spellbinders used their UGC tools along with the preference center to create a truly unique experience?
Each preference center now links to the user’s social media activity. It collects UGC to display a personalized gallery of the crafter’s own projects. Even if the user has similar interests to someone else, they’ll still see a completely unique gallery that’s all their own work. Best of all, it’s enhanced with shoppable links that are directly relevant to the individual.
The preference center is also synced to Spellbinders’ customer relationship management system (CRM). Spellbinders can use the preference data gathered in Wyng to personalize messages across multiple other channels, from online ads to email newsletters and SMS. That’s crucial as customers develop their skills and interests in different crafts.
“Preference data can change,” explains Greg. “Say someone gets a new die cutting machine – they’d be able to come in here and change it to say they upgraded.” With Wyng, Spellbinders can even prompt customers to update specific details at regular intervals.
What Will Spellbinders Create Next?
Since Spellbinders started working with Wyng, they’ve collected and displayed thousands of photo and video submissions from customers. Over 10,000 customers have active preference centers on the Spellbinders site – meaning that over 10,000 customers receive personalized content and product recommendations to drive sales.
This combination of zero-party data and UGC has become a crucial sales driver for the brand. It helps to surface individual products and simplify navigation for customers. At the same time, it creates a truly unique customer experience for each individual.
There are still more ways that Spellbinders could use zero-party data. While Spellbinders has focused on the preference center so far, they could also use the Wyng platform to create quizzes and surveys – collecting data that could feed into the preference center in a more engaging, interactive way. They could refine UGC galleries to include projects relevant to users, instead of just their own content. They could even extend personalization to more areas of the site, such as surfacing specific blog posts based on users’ interests.
Just like any craft project, it’s theirs to create and shape.
Design a new experience for your customers with Wyng. Talk to us about how to engage your audience, collect data, and personalize in real time.
