PDF patterns are a big thing- we all love the instant gratification of being able to download a PDF and get started on that new project.
We have been on the fence about PDFs- as a quilt pattern business, we want to support the Local Quilt Shops. We love our local shops and we want them to stay in business!
But, we love our individual customers as well. So we were going to start to put more PDFs up- on Craftsy and in our online shop.
And then we learned about the VAT tax laws going into effect in the European Union on January 1st 2015. If you don’t know about this, I am NOT going into detail. You can Google it and learn a lot.
But basically, we would have change to be able to charge tax and file those taxes for any patterns sold to anyone in any of the 28 EU countries and deal with many tax rates, filing requirements, etc even for the smallest sale. It is too much for a small company like ours.
Many pattern designers are making decisions on how to handle these issues. Some are pulling patterns, some are blocking sales to any country but the US (many of the payment vendors we all use do not allow individual countries to be blocked), …. there are many different ways to handle this and everyone has to decide for their business what works.
And yes, this does apply to US companies (even though some think it does not). We wish it didn’t.
But since it does, we plan to abide by the law.
So, we are not going to sell PDF patterns right now and we are pulling our paid PDF patterns off Craftsy as of Dec 31st. This was not an easy decision. We will continue to follow this issue and see if there are other ways to offer PDFs within the limits of the law.
Luckily, this does not affect any free PDFs! We will continue to offer those when we can.
Thank you for all your support this past year- we hope you had fun and we are looking forward to sharing more with you in 2015!
happy quilting,
Kate