How the Doan Family Built the $100M "Disneyland of Quilting"

Jenny Doan isn’t your average YouTube star.

For starters, she’s in her 60s, and her main topic? Quilt tutorials.

And yet, she’s the face of a $100M empire that has transformed a tiny rural town into what some call the “Disneyland of Quilting.” 

The secret to Missouri Star Quilt Company’s success? A three-part flywheel: Content → Commerce → Community. It’s a masterclass in how you can use content to fuel commerce and deepen community— and something more companies should be paying attention to in 2025.

This is a story about how a small-town family bootstrapped their way to the top of an overlooked, multi-billion-dollar industry—creating not just a business, but a physical destination that thousands of quilters travel to every year. 

So how did they pull it off?

Let’s start at the beginning — with a quilt, a one-year waitlist, and a son who saw a billion-dollar opportunity.

It All Started With a One-Year Waitlist

In 2008, Al Doan was in his mid-20s, working in tech startups and learning how to build businesses. He wasn’t thinking about quilting—until a conversation with his mom, Jenny, changed everything.

Jenny had been quilting for years, but she wasn’t a professional. She just loved it. So when she wanted to get a quilt finished, she took it to a local quilt shop—and was told there was a one-year waitlist for long-arm quilting services.

That number blew Al’s mind.

“Wait—you’re telling me there’s so much demand that these places are booked an entire year in advance?”

To him, that wasn’t just a minor inconvenience—that was a business opportunity.

Al didn’t know much about quilting, but he did know that if people are willing to wait a year for something, they’ll definitely pay to get it done faster.

So he did what any entrepreneur would do—he ran the numbers.

• 💰 Long-arm quilting machines cost about $40,000

• 💰 His sister had a house they could take a second mortgage on

• 💰 If they could process just a few quilts a week, they could at least cover costs

It wasn’t a grand business at the time. They just thought,  “Let’s start a small quilting shop and see where it goes.”

The initial idea was simple: Run a local quilting shop, just like thousands of others across America.

The problem? Most quilt shops are small passion projects, run by retirees who just want wholesale fabric access. They barely break even.

Al quickly realized that model wasn’t enough to build something sustainable. They needed to do something different. Something bigger. And to do that, they needed outside customers—people beyond their small town of 1,500 residents.

At the same time, Al lost his tech job, which pushed him into full time entrepreneurship. 

That’s when he decided to go all in on this quilting business. And first, they turned to YouTube.

Cracking the YouTube Code Before It Was Cool

It’s 2008. YouTube is barely a year old. There are no playbooks, no Mr. Beasts, no monetization strategies. Most people still saw it as a place for cat videos and home movie clips, not a legitimate business channel.  It certainly wasn’t the obvious place for a quilting company to build an audience.

But Al saw an opportunity; He saw a platform with unlimited reach, something that could take them far beyond the 1,500 residents of Hamilton, Missouri.

He convinced his mom to start filming free quilting tutorials. 

At first, it was just an experiment. They didn’t have a detailed content strategy or a vision for how YouTube would drive business. It was more of a “let’s throw something at the wall and see if it sticks” approach. Al set up a camera, and Jenny started filming quilting tutorials.

Jenny wasn’t a professionally trained quilter. She had taken a few local quilting classes but wasn’t the most technically skilled person in the craft. 

That turned out to be an advantage. Unlike traditional quilting content, which was often dry and overly complicated, Jenny’s tutorials felt accessible. She spoke in plain language, broke things down into simple steps, and infused humor into the lessons.

Her warmth, humor, and ability to make quilting approachable resonated. But then the comments started pouring in. People weren’t just watching; they were making their first-ever quilts because of Jenny’s tutorials. They weren’t just engaging; they were buying the exact fabric she used in the videos.

By 2013, Jenny was a YouTube star, and Missouri Star had crossed $4M in revenue.

And this was just the beginning. Because content wasn’t the endgame — it was the first step in a much bigger play.

Scaling Into a $4B Industry

Most people wouldn’t expect it, but quilting is big business. The industry generates $4 billion annually and has 12 million quilters in the U.S. alone.

Yet despite its size, the market was fragmented. Most quilt shops were small, independently owned, and barely scraping by. These were passion projects by retirees, not scalable businesses.

They weren’t thinking about e-commerce, digital marketing, or scalable business models.

Again this was an opportunity for the Doan family, who were outsiders in more ways than way.

The Missouri Star Quilt Co. changed that. They used daily deal emails, YouTube-driven product promotions, and ready-to-quilt kits that simplified the buying process for beginners — all of which drove the growth of an e-commerce machine.

They experimented relentlessly, testing what worked and what didn’t.

For most small businesses, hitting a few million in revenue would be enough. But Missouri Star wasn’t content with just being a successful quilt shop. They wanted to compete at scale.

The quilting industry had major players—Joann Fabric, Michaels, Hobby Lobby—who collectively controlled billions in annual sales. [For what it’s worth, Joann alone did $8 billion in revenue in 2024. They also filed bankruptcy in Jan. 2025] 

While these companies dominated retail, they lacked the direct connection to customers that Missouri Star had built.

Instead of building products, the company prioritized building relationships and community at its core. That became their competitive advantage. Instead of trying to beat Joann’s on price or selection, Missouri Star doubled down on experience and engagement.

By 2015, Missouri Star was the largest quilting company in the world — but their biggest move was still to come. 

Building the ‘Disneyland of Quilting’

As Missouri Star grew, something unexpected happened: their audience wanted to visit them in person. Their community felt a deep, real, tangible connection to the brand.