Jenny Doan
As an American quilter and YouTube influencer, Jenny Doan became famous as the co-founder and face of the Missouri Star Quilt Company, the “largest quilting supply vendor in the United States.” The Missouri Star YouTube channel has more than 250 million views and over 843,000 subscribers.
In 2022, Jenny was included on Forbes’ 50 Over 50 list. The list seeks to highlight “women who are actively stepping into their power in their sixth decade or beyond,” and that the publication was “looking for stories about accelerating or recreating careers to reach the highest echelons of a business or field after turning 50—with an eye on women who have overcome significant odds and are creating businesses at scale.”[1]
Doan, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, learned to sew with a 4-H Club youth organization when she was ten years old. She continued sewing well into her adult life. She took her first quilting class after the family moved to Missouri.
She married Ron Doan in 1980 and lived in the Salinas, California, area until 1995, when financial difficulties led Jenny and Ron to consider moving their family of seven children to a more affordable area. The idea to move to the midwest led them to Missouri.
- They intended to find a place to live in Far West, a city they’d read about in the Doctrine and Covenants. But they ran into a problem: Far West isn’t actually a city anymore—just a small historic site. But even after discovering Far West wasn’t what they thought, the Doans weren’t deterred.
- “The next-closest place was Hamilton, so we came over and lived here,” Jenny says.
- The family found a home in a farmhouse that was more than 100 years old, but no one in their family had landed a job, and they were now in a community that had been wary of “Mormons” since the earliest days of the Church.[2]
Ron found a job as a machinist and the family started saving for retirement. But the recession of 2008 proved to be disastrous financially, as it was for millions of other people.
The Doan’s son Alan, noticed a business opportunity for his parents. “When Jenny mentioned to Alan that she needed to pick up a quilt she’d been waiting over a year to have bound, Alan perked up—someone had enough orders to be backlogged for over a year? That sounded to him like a service in high demand. So without doing any further market research, he proposed the idea of buying a long-arm quilting machine for Jenny so she could make some extra money for retirement by finishing other people’s quilts. While Jenny had always enjoyed sewing clothes and in the past few years had fallen in love with quilting, she’d never used a long-arm machine before. But she felt confident she could figure it out.”[3]
The Doan’s daughter Sarah took out a second mortgage to buy the machine and a building to place it in. Business was slow at first, so Alan suggested that his mother post videos on YouTube of her giving step-by-step instructions on how to make quilts.
By 2013, Jenny was a YouTube star and their annual revenue had topped $4 million.
When her viewers asked where to buy the fabrics she used, her son Alan and a business partner figured out how to fill orders, thus expanding the Missouri Star Quilt Company. The Doan siblings were named the Missouri Small Business Persons of the Year in 2015.[4]
Jenny Doan’s business has revitalized the business district of the town of Hamilton, Missouri. But her influence is global. “When my first letters came, that wasn’t even on my radar. I just thought I was going to teach people how to sew, then they’d send their quilts to me, and that’s how I’d make money,” she says. “The letters that always stunned me were ones that came from overseas in places I’d never heard of, never dreamt of being able to go. Their lives were so different from ours, but they wanted to bring the same joy to people [through quilting] as I brought to them; they wanted to be able to teach people. They didn’t have fabric, but they had clothing, and they would cut up their clothing. It was just so amazing to me.”[5]
Jenny was born on June 11, 1957, in San Luis Obispo, and raised in the Salinas Valley and the Monterey Bay area. She is the author, with Mark Dagostino, of How to Stitch an American Dream.
