Store Review: Len’s Mills in London, Ontario

What is it?: Len’s Mills is a chain of discount fabric and sewing stores found in southwestern Ontario and the GTA. In addition to massive quantities of fabric, quilting supplies, sewing notions, yarn and knitting supplies, they sell a ton of of other craft supplies for scrapbooking, cardmaking, embroidery, felting and general crafts, as well as gifts, clothing, home and seasonal decor and even some groceries and household basics (ie. cleaning products, paper towels etc).

Where is it?: Locations include Hamilton, Cambridge, Guelph, Toronto, Waterloo, London and Woodstock. This review only pertains to the London location, as that’s the only store I’ve visited. The London store is located at 360 Exeter Road in London, Ontario.

Rating and Abridged Review: 3/5 stitches. Len’s Mills has lots to offer quilters and fabric hoarders, but for those who are solely looking for cross stitch supplies, Len’s has most of the basics (some floss, fabric, needles, etc.) but is probably not worth going out of your way to visit. The store is rather dirty, disorganized and cluttered, and prices and overall selection of products are only so-so.

The Loooooooong Review: Since July, I’ve had a 50$ Len’s Mills gift certificate. I won it from a promotion that a local news network was running during the summer, but I hadn’t actually had an opportunity to go to one of the stores as they don’t have a location in Mississauga or anywhere else super close to me. So when my partner and I were planning a short trip to visit his family in Windsor this past weekend, I asked him if he wouldn’t mind stopping at the Len’s Mills in London so that I could finally use my gift certificate. We usually stop around London anyways for coffee/rest rooms, as it’s a good half-way point during the drive to get out and have a quick break, and the London location on Exeter road was really close to the highway so it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience.

Now, I need to state right away that I am reviewing Len’s Mills primarily from the perspective of what they have to offer in terms of stitching supplies, and to a much lesser extent, the overall shopping experience. I don’t sew much right now as I am without a sewing machine at the moment (saving up for a new one) and also without my mom’s expertise, but if I were reviewing the store from the perspective of a quilter or a garment maker my review would probably be more positive, as they did seem to have a ton of fabric for pretty reasonable prices. But stitching is my primary craft-related hobby right now, and when I won the gift card I checked the Len’s Mills website to confirm that they sold stitching supplies (their website specifically mentions that they sell DMC floss and other embroidery materials). I also asked on their facebook page if the London store specifically had DMC floss and other cross-stitch items as I didn’t want to drive there without confirming, and was told that they most certainly did. So I had the intention of using my gift certificate to buy 50$ worth of stash, or to at least stock up on some DMC floss for future projects I need to kit up. Therefore cross-stitch supplies is the perspective from which I am reviewing Len’s.

So about the store. I have to be honest and say that my expectations weren’t all that high, as I had heard from a few other stitchers on facebook that their visits to the Len’s in Toronto (on Orfus road) were mostly a disappointment, and that they only sold grubby bolts of white 14-count aida and grubby floss. The London store wasn’t as bad as those comments had  prepared me for, but as a retail store Len’s really doesn’t really present itself as all that welcoming or tidy of an environment. The London store is located in what looks like an old warehouse building, with no windows, dirty concrete floors and metal walls. The entrance to the store was around one side of the building, and was marked by soggy arrows (it’s been a wet winter so far) printed on standard office paper and taped to the walls.

The front door is just a single door with more soggy printer paper taped to it (I think one paper stated the store hours and the other requested that food and drink be left outside which is of course standard for a fabric store). There’s no glass store-front and not even a single window on the entrance. The single front door basically looks like the back entrance to a dingy shop or warehouse, and I was worried for a second that we were going into the staff/back entrance, but other customers were also walking towards the same door. I’m not trying to be overly superficial here, and I don’t expect every store I shop in be a fancy boutique complete with chandeliers, impeccable hardwood floors and tastefully distressed antique furniture, but if I do shop in a store that looks like an unrenovated warehouse, I kind of expect good discounts and warehouse level prices.

Inside, the store appears vageuly dirty, and very disorganized and quite cluttered. Many shelves and products have a layer of dust on them, or just look a bit grimy/old. There are a few large signs over the clothing area indicating “Men’s” and “Women’s,” but on the craft side of the store there wasn’t really a clear organizational scheme and there were no signs or labels for any of the aisles, or even aisle numbers. Some aisles were quite messy and mixed up, very cluttered with products that were piled messily on shelves, whereas other aisles were half-empty with lots of empty pegs, badly needing to be re-stocked.

Overall I think it could be pretty hard to find what you looking for, especially if you were looking for a very specific craft item. The store is large and there’s not really any signage. Although there was a specific section for the yarn, and all of the fabric was towards the back, in the middle craft aisles home decor and Christmas stuff was all mixed in with feathers and paint and wooden objects and scrapbooking stuff with no real way to find what you’re looking for.

In terms of customer service, I was was not greeted by any staff when I entered the store, nor was I approached by staff at any point to see if I needed help. There were no staff on the floor of the store at all apart from a teen boy carrying some boxes out, but there was a cluster of staff up at the front customer service desk chatting among themselves. My only interaction with staff was when I went to check out, and although the cashier was friendly, they only had one cash register open so we had about a 10 minute wait in line (not a long wait by any means but considering a lot of staff was standing around just chatting you’d think they might open up a second register). Now personally I tend to be a pretty independent shopper so I honestly didn’t mind the fact that I wasn’t approached by staff but in comparison to the type of personal service that can be found at a local needlework shop (LNS) or even at my local Michael’s where I am usually at least greeted upon entering the store, the customer service at Len’s Mills was pretty non-existent.

Anyways, I eventually located the cross stitch and embroidery supplies. They did have one whole side of a small-ish aisle devoted to cross stitch and embroidery, although there was some empty wall space. Close to a half of the aisle consisted of kits. Unlike most stores, I actually don’t think they had any Dimensions kits, which tends to be the most common brand. Most of the kits were by Kustom Krafts, and the selection of kits was pretty traditional. There were a few florals, a lighthouse, some animal scenes like a tiger and some wolves in the forest, and I think a still-life with wine and fruit. In total, there were maybe 10 different Kustom Krafts kits to choose from. There were also a couple of Thomas Kinkade landscape/scenery kits, which I think are by Canadamar Designs. I didn’t pay too much attention to the kits as I wasn’t interested in any of them, but the prices seemed fairly normal on those.

As for floss, they had a large rack of the standard, solid-coloured 6-stranded DMC floss (and also several big messy heaps of skeins on top of the rack and on the shelves… presumably floss that had fallen or been taken off and then never organized back onto the rack). The price was $0.89 per skein, which I wasn’t too impressed by since I usually get my floss for $0.48 (or less if I have coupons) at my local Michael’s. I do understand that it’s not entirely fair to compare the pricing at a smaller store to the pricing at a large national chain like Michael’s, as smaller businesses don’t buy in as large quantities and simply can’t sell floss at less than 50 cents if they are going to make any kind of a profit, but at the same time, the $0.89 per skein is basically what I’d pay at a much fancier LNS. Considering that the service, shopping experience and cleanliness is so, so much better at a LNS so I can’t really see any reason to buy floss at somewhere dusty and grimy like Len’s Mill’s.

Since I had a gift certificate though, anything that I bought under 50$ was technically going to be free for me, so I had the intention of grabbing some floss for a project I will be doing in the New Year. But I think out of the first 10 colour codes or so that I looked for on the rack, four were missing/out of stock. Although the rack was organized numerically by colour code, I found it pretty slow and tedious to find the  correct code on the very jumbled and crowded rack (and some colours were hung on the wrong hook for their number so I had to check very carefully), so I kind of got frustrated and gave up on buying individual skeins, and after grabbing a few I decided to spend my 50$ on items that were faster to pick out. I like that the way that Michael’s organizes their floss better (ie. in little slots/compartments spread out along a wall in numerical order).

Len’s Mill did also have a decent selection of DMC specialty floss hanging on the pegs on the wall. They appeared to have the full selection of metallics (DMC light effects, DMC fluorescents and DMC jewel effects) sold by the individual skein, for I think something like $2.90 per skein, although to be honest I don’t remember the exact price (but it was definitely $2 and something). They also had what appeared to be the full line of colour variations floss, sold by the individual skein for I think $1.90 per skein. And they sold a bunch of the multi-packs of floss, like the DMC Holiday floss collection, the “popular colours” multi-pack collection (36 skeins), and some of the multi-packs of metallics and colour variations that are available by DMC (Michael’s has the same ones).

They also had a small-ish, half-empty rack of anchor floss for I think 39 cents per skein, which in retrospect was, unlike a lot of the other stuff, a pretty great price, but I don’t use anchor very often so I wouldn’t have known what colours to pick out.

And then they had some packaged fabric, all DMC or Charles Craft brand. They had: 2-3 packages of 28-count tea-dyed linen, 1-2 packages of white 28-count evenweave, 14-count aida in several different colours (light pink, light blue, white, oatmeal, brown) and a couple tubes of white 16-count aida as well. Not an amazing selection of fabric but fairly comparable to what my local Michael’s sells, with perhaps a few less colour options than Michael’s. I don’t know if they had any bolts of aida or linen or anything that could be cut and puchased by the yard back in the actual fabric section of the store, as I didn’t go looking.

In terms of accessories, they had some DMC needles in various sizes, DMC plastic bobbins, bobbin winders, those metal rings by DMC for holding bobbins, some of the packs of stitch-bow holders and stitch-bow binder inserts (also a DMC product), a couple of plastic bobbin-storage boxes, and a couple of black needlework travel bags by DMC. And that was what was in the cross-stitch aisle.

Strangely, almost every product that came in plastic or cardboard packaging looked very banged up/had seen better days. Most of the plastic multi-packs of floss were all dented up, and had tape all over them holding the package shut/together. The packaged fabric also looked like it had been thrown messily into storage forever, with something heavy on top of it and sort of dinged-up, taped-shut packaging. And anything in a cardboard box looked kind of dirty and squashed. I’m not sure what Len’s Mills does with their products or how they store them, or if it’s just the fact that their products sit around forever, but again it doesn’t really present the store that well when all their products are in such shabby, banged up packaging.

Anyways, here’s what I got with my 50$ gift certificate:

My Len’s Mill Haul

• Two tubes of Charles Craft tea-dyed Irish linen/lugana evenweave, 28-count, measuring 20 x 24 inches. These appeared to be $11.99 originally (based on the first sticker), but were now $9.99. 10$ each is actually a pretty good price for this box of fabric. Michael’s sells the exact same item for I think around 14$, although I don’t usually buy this fabric at Michael’s unless I have one of their 40% or 50% off a single item coupons, so although I have gotten the same fabric at Michael’s for around 7$, 10$ was still a pretty great price. Strangely though, both boxes of fabric were taped shut at both ends, as though they had been opened, and the packaging wasn’t in great shape as mentioned earlier. For whatever reason the fabric was already fraying quite a lot at both ends, which isn’t something that usually happens when I buy this exact same packaged fabric at Michael’s. I know this type of fabric does fray a bit if you don’t serge it or zig-zag stitch the edges, but in my experience that usually doesn’t happen until the fabric is taken out of the box and handled a lot/stitched on.
  

  Frayed like this on both ends

  So I don’t know if for some reason this fabric was taken out of it’s packaging and then taped up and re-packaged, or if the fraying is just something that happened over time because the box has sat around forever.

• I did pick out four skeins of individual DMC floss, at $0.89 per skein. These are colours I need for an upcoming project.
• I got four packs of DMC tapestry needles at $1.79 each. I got two packs of size 26, which is what I usually use with aida, and two packs of size 28, which is the size I usually use with evenweave or linen. I figured I’d just stock up on some extra needles as I tend to always require fresh needles as I go through mine fairly quickly either by losing them or generally wearing through them (the finish comes off and they get dull after you’ve stitched with one needle a lot, it’s better to take a new needle after a few weeks).
• I got two packs of cute Christmas stickers, at $1.69 each. Technically not stitching-related, but I knew that I needed a couple more dollars of stuff to get up to $50 (I wanted to use the whole gift certificate in one go), so I figured these stickers would be cute and fun for sticking in Christmas cards, on Christmas wrapping, etc.
• Finally, I got a pastel multi-pack of DMC Color Variations floss. The original sticker said $24.99, but it had since been marked down to $12.50. There were supposed to be 12 skeins of floss, but 2 of the 12 had fallen or been taken out of the pack and were totally missing, so I’m assuming that’s why it had been marked down to half-price. I opened the pack in the car and confirmed there were definitely only 10 skeins (I had counted in the store too but just wanted to check). The cardboard packaging was shabby and had been ripped open and then taped back up with a TON of tape (and they put the tape over the floss which was annoying to try to disentangle), but appearance asides I paid $1.25 per skein for 10 skeins of color variations floss, which is way cheaper than they are ever sold for individually, and I always love the color variations floss as it’s super pretty!

At the end of the day, I got 50$ of stash basically for free (since I won the gift card in a draw), so I can’t complain too much. But if I’m writing an honest review and frankly stating my opinion, Len’s Mills is kind of an odd store, with its clutter of food and Christmas decorations and dusty craft supplies. The overall mess and lack of cleanliness, and the condition of their products and its packaging is a bit off-putting. Their selection of cross-stitch supplies is reasonably good, depending on what you’re looking for. They sell all the basics in terms of floss, needles, bobbins and some packaged fabric, although quite a few DMC and anchor colours were completely out of stock. Their pricing for DMC floss sold by the individual skein isn’t great, but some of the multi-packs are actually a good deal (like the Color Variations) and the pricing on the fabric and accessories was decent too but nothing really to write home about (ie. the store may be in a warehouse but the pricing isn’t like warehouse discount level). Overall I feel that the pricing and selection was nothing fantastic but good enough to warrant around a 3/5 rating. I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to go to Len’s Mills for cross-stitch supplies but if you have a location that’s nearby or convenient to you, then you could check it out for yourself. Overall, I prefer just shopping at my local Michael’s (which is clean, bright and well-organized) for DMC floss and basics, and online or a LNS for more specialty fabric and floss.