The author
Jimenez Julien, the person behind QuiltCounter
I build and maintain QuiltCounter, and I am the person who answers when you write to the shop line.
Why I built a system for quilt shops
The first quilt shop I worked in was not mine. A friend of the family ran a store of about 1,900 bolts in a converted feed building, and one January she asked me to look at why her January numbers never matched her January stock. I spent four days behind her cutting counter with a clipboard, and by the second day I had stopped looking at software and started looking at the counter itself. Every problem she had was downstream of one fact: the yardage on a bolt is a moving number that nobody was writing down.
Retail software treats a bolt like a box of screws. It is a unit, you have eleven of them, you sell one, now you have ten. Fabric does not behave that way. A bolt arrives labelled fifteen yards and measures fourteen and a half. Somebody cuts a two and three eighths, then a fat quarter, then the last piece goes to the remnant bin at a discount. The cardboard tube stays on the shelf looking exactly as full as it did before. I could not find a single product on the US market that treated yardage as the primary unit and the bolt as the container. So I wrote one.
What working with shop owners has taught me
The women who run these shops are not intimidated by technology. They are intimidated by software that costs them a Saturday. That distinction shaped almost every decision in QuiltCounter. The cutting counter screen does three things and nothing else, because it gets used by a part time employee standing up, holding scissors, with a customer waiting. The reporting is deliberately dense and unapologetic, because the owner reading it at nine at night already knows her business better than any dashboard could explain it to her.
The second lesson was about classes. I originally shipped inventory alone, and within a month three shops asked whether the same fabric reservation logic could hold the yardage for a class kit. Classes turned out to be where most independent shops actually make their margin, and where the record keeping was worst: deposits in a cash box, drops recorded by text message, teacher pay worked out from memory. Rosters and kit assembly were not a feature request, they were the other half of the same job.
The third lesson was about pace. Quilt shops have seasons. Nobody wants a migration in October, and nobody wants a software update the week of a retreat. We ship changes on a slow, announced schedule, and we do not move things around on the screen without telling you first.
Experience and expertise
- Fourteen years building operational software for small businesses that hold physical stock, with the last six focused entirely on textile and craft retail.
- Time behind the counter in seven independent quilt shops across four states, including two full inventory counts and one retreat kit run of 340 bags.
- Direct work with fabric distribution reps to understand case packs, minimums and how a purchase order has to be formatted to be accepted without a phone call.
- Responsibility for the data protection posture of every product MLJ, SASU publishes, including the retention schedule and the export path described in our privacy policy.
How this product is built and maintained
QuiltCounter is published by MLJ, SASU and developed as a small, funded product with no outside investors setting a growth timetable. Feature work comes from a public request list that customers can see and vote on, and anything that changes the cutting counter screen is tested in at least two live shops before it reaches everyone. We write our own documentation and we do not use generated filler: if a help page describes a screen, someone has used that screen that month.
Every claim on this website is one I can support. The statistics on the home page come from a survey of 62 shops that had been running for at least ninety days, taken in June 2026, and the testimonials are from named owners who agreed to be quoted. If a number here is ever out of date, that is my error to correct, and you can tell me about it directly.
I am accountable for four things: that the yardage math is correct, that your data is exportable at any moment, that support answers within one business day, and that pricing does not change without ninety days of notice. Those are the promises I would want from a vendor if I were the one running the shop.
Published articles
Every article in Bolt and Counter is written here, from shop visits, buying appointments and the questions owners send in after a demo.
- How do I set my price per yard when my wholesale cost keeps moving on reorders?
- What does my state actually require me to collect in sales tax on fabric and class fees?
- Why does my bolt count on paper never match what is on the shelf at inventory time?
- Should I run beginner classes myself or pay a teacher a cut of every seat sold?
- How do I build a class kit that actually turns a profit instead of eating my scraps?
- What do I owe a customer when a class is canceled or she drops out the night before?
- How did one shop cut its dead bolt inventory in half over a single fiscal year?
- What happens to my shop when the big fabric collections shift to online only distribution?
- What actually happens on the shop floor during a busy row by row or shop hop weekend?
Contact the author
Write to me at jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. If you want to see the product against your own inventory rather than a sample shop, say so and send an export. You can also start from the request form on the home page or read the questions other owners asked first.
Published by MLJ, SASU. Legal details are on the legal notice page, and this page is written and maintained by Jimenez Julien.