Golden Peak’s Newest Acquisition Brings Newbie Subscribers to Portfolio

Golden Peak Media bought Creativebug this month from bankrupt Jo-Ann Stores, expanding its access to beginner crafters at a time when younger generations are turning to hobbies from quilting to knitting—and in an industry where print remains very relevant. Terms weren’t disclosed. 

Golden Peak Media serves arts and crafts enthusiasts with print and digital content, events and community. Its titles tend to attract hobbyists looking to go deeper into their chosen pastimes. Meanwhile, Creativebug draws more of a starter crowd with online video arts and crafts workshops and classes, selling to both consumers and to libraries, referred to as its B2B business.

The purchase was funded by Macanta Investments, the primary investment vehicle for investor Terry O’Toole, formerly of Goldman Sachs, and his family. Macanta is also the largest shareholder of Golden Peak Media.  

“There’s this natural flow of learning and exploring through Creativebug and then being able to drill down deeper and become more experienced through the niche products that Golden Peak provides,” Chief Executive Officer David Saabye told AMO. 

Together, Golden Peak Media and Creativebug, with a combined staff of over 60, have a total of 250,000 paid subscribers—20% came from Creativebug—with 60% being print and digital, and 40% digital only. B2B enterprise subscribers (libraries who provide access to Creativebug to their patrons) total 1,250 with libraries in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand participating. 

Paper Arts, Events

Golden Peak is centered around fine arts like oil painting and watercolors, quilting—which has five magazines and two PBS TV shows—sewing and beading, jewelry making and fiber arts. Meanwhile, Creativebug has those activities plus everything from friendship bracelets to baking and cake decorating. 

Paper arts is another where Creativebug is strong, a fact that could prompt Golden Peak to reboot a title called Craft Paper Scissors, which is currently on the back burner. On the other hand, in-person and live events are also an opportunity. Golden Peak holds three ticketed events, one of which is debuting this year.

• Maker Festival in Lancaster, Pennsylvania (summer) – around 1,500-2,000 attendees, featuring an expo and week-long courses in various crafts
• A jewelry and beading-focused event in Milwaukee in October (new this year)
• A yarn-focused event in Estes Park, Colorado in April

Tickets are around $15 to $20 and workshops from metalsmithing to enameling cost in the hundreds of dollars.

And the trend is spreading. On June 15, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled: 20-Somethings Are Taking Up Grandma’s Favorite Hobbies, discussing the increase in the number of young Americans taking up knitting and needlepoint as they seek out escapes from technology and stress and build community.  

Saabye cites exactly the stress of the news cycle—war in the Middle East, political violence, tariff and economic uncertainty—as well as AI weighing on people. 

“The more time you spend in front of a screen, the easier it is to be fed all this information, either voluntarily because you’re seeking it out, or passively, because I’m reading The Wall Street Journal story, and there’s a row of other articles about war in Israel, so you can’t escape it,” Saabye said. “But you read a magazine on, here’s the 100 best watercolor paintings of the year, and there’s none of that. There’s no war, there’s no politics, there’s no violence, there’s no crime, there’s no pressure about taxes. It’s just there for you to become inspired.”

Creativebug subscriptions for consumers range from $5.95 to $9.95 a month. The library (B2B) subscriptions pricing is based on the library’s service area (population) and ranges from around $1,000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars, Saabye said. The company is profitable.

“That really makes this a nice stable piece of a nice stable company,” Saabye said.

Subscriptions for Golden Peak titles range from $9.99 to $14.99 a month. Saabye wouldn’t disclose revenue figures but said the majority of sales comes from subscriptions, and it’s a continued focus for the business. Saabye said:

The magazines actually are a value to our communities… all of our magazines are high quality, thick stock, larger than most other magazines you would get when you subscribe to something. And the point of them is that it feels like an enjoyable reading experience. So for the art ones, they’re highly visual. They’re colorful. It’s all meant to inspire you as an artist to do more… The same thing in quilting, and the reason it worked well in quilting is a little bit different. In quilting, we have five magazines, four of them are heavily pattern driven. 

The patterns that we produce are easy to follow, and when in their print form, all the measurements are there. You can tear it out, photocopy it, and it works in that magazine format, combined with really nice photography of that end result, that product that’s been produced out of the pattern.

Instead of publishing more frequently, Golden Peak has invested more deeply in each individual issue, increasing the size and content and trimming to a cadence to four from six times a year. Because there’s less frequency and little timeliness, they keep for a lot longer on newsstands. Plus, it takes tens or hundreds of hours to create a quilt, meaning there’s no need to have quick turnover in editions.

“Our newsstand sales have been very strong with that model,” Saabye said. In fact, one of their quilting arts magazines saw its best newsstand sales ever this year. It focused on quilting as an art form, as opposed to just producing a blanket or a traditional quilt. 

“It’s using the craft of quilting to produce a tapestry, like a scenery or something, or in this case, it was like an issue on quilted clothing, there was somebody who looked like they’re wearing a ski suit or a tuxedo,” Saabye said.

Saabye sees the magazines holding their own over the long term because of their quality. “We have a number of titles that no longer print, but we still continue to sell back issues, both physical back issues and digital downloads of them going back years, because they still have something that is timeless and of interest to somebody.”

When asked about possible future deals, Saabye said:

M&A is important for scale. So in this case, it was helping us to find a very like minded audience and a very like minded team and a completely aligned product set, so to the degree that there are other things out there, whether it be a new digital product, a video service or magazines or books, that fits that community focus, and it’s that mission of helping you as an artist or craft person to get more joy out of what you do, we would be open to that.