The Woobles was last valued at $7.5 million. That figure comes from the deal Justine Tiu and Adrian Zhang shook on during their 2022 Shark Tank appearance, and it is the only public valuation the company has ever had. The deal never closed, so nothing has replaced it. The business itself now runs at roughly $5 million in annual revenue with around 50 employees.
That is the short answer. The longer one is more useful, because the gap between what a company sells and what a company is worth is where nearly all the confusion about this question lives.
What is The Woobles’ net worth?
There is no official net worth figure for The Woobles, and there never has been. It is a private company. Private companies do not publish their books, and nobody outside the business is obliged to say what it is worth.
What does exist is a valuation, and it comes from one specific evening. On September 30, 2022, Tiu and Zhang appeared on season 14 of Shark Tank asking for $250,000 in exchange for 5 percent of their company. That ask priced the business at $5 million. The sharks were skeptical of the number at first, then the sales figures changed their minds. All five wanted a piece.
After the bidding, the couple shook hands with Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner on $450,000 for 6 percent. Do the arithmetic and that lands on a $7.5 million valuation.
Then it fell apart. The deal never closed. Cuban confirmed it afterwards, saying the decision was the founders’ own and that he did not know the reason behind it. Handshakes on the show are not legally binding, and plenty of them dissolve during the due diligence that follows. The founders declined to explain.
The $7.5 million figure is real, but it is a snapshot from a televised negotiation in 2022 that never turned into money changing hands. It is the last public marker, not today’s price.
So when you see a confident net worth number for The Woobles, check what it is anchored to. If it is not the 2022 valuation or the company’s own stated revenue, it is almost certainly a calculation somebody made up.
It also helps to know what net worth even means for a business like this one. For a public company, the market sets a price every second of the trading day. For a private company, a valuation only exists at the moment somebody agrees to buy a slice of it. Between those moments there is no price, just estimates. The Woobles has had exactly one of those moments in public, and it did not complete.
How much money does The Woobles make?
The Woobles is a $5 million business by annual revenue, and it employs about 50 people out of North Carolina.
That number matters more than the valuation does, because it is current and it describes actual trade rather than a negotiating position. Here is how the company grew into it.
| Year | Milestone | Figure |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Launched from a basement in July | About $200 in starting materials |
| 2022 | Cumulative sales stated on Shark Tank | $5.3 million since launch |
| 2022 | Full-year sales the founders projected | About $7 million |
| 2023 | Moved into a Cary warehouse | 20 employees |
| 2024 | Inc. 5000 ranking | No. 19, with 10,406% three-year growth |
| 2025 | Company size reported by the founders | About $5 million a year, 50 employees |
One thing to keep straight: revenue is the money coming in the door, not the money the founders keep. A business selling $5 million in kits might hold on to a healthy slice after paying for yarn, manufacturing, shipping, warehousing, staff, and advertising, or it might hold on to very little. Margins have never been published, so the honest position is that nobody outside the company knows.
The trajectory, though, is not in doubt. Placing 19th out of 5,000 companies on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private businesses in America is a hard thing to fake, because entry requires submitting verified revenue figures for a three-year window. A growth rate above 10,000 percent means revenue roughly hundredfolded across those three years.
Why the online figures disagree so much
Search this question and you will find numbers from about $2.6 million to $20 million. They disagree because they are measuring three different things, and most of them are not measuring the company at all.
YouTube earnings estimates
The Woobles runs a YouTube channel with over a million subscribers and hundreds of millions of lifetime views. Automated tools take the view count, multiply by an assumed ad rate, and print a net worth. Those tools produce the lowest figures you will see, often in the $2 million to $3 million range.
They are answering a different question. The channel is a marketing engine for the kits, not the business itself. Ad revenue from crochet tutorials is a rounding error next to product sales, so treating a YouTube estimate as the company’s worth undercounts it badly.
Growth multipliers applied to the 2022 valuation
The highest figures, the ones in the $10 million to $20 million band, are usually built by taking the $7.5 million Shark Tank valuation and adding a percentage for each year since. Sometimes the assumed growth rate is stated, often it is not.
That is arithmetic dressed up as analysis. It assumes a growth rate nobody has verified and compounds it against a valuation that was itself never tested by a completed transaction. Compounding a shaky starting number does not make it firmer, it just moves it further from anything checkable.
What a defensible estimate looks like
A profitable direct-to-consumer brand doing around $5 million a year, with real brand recognition, licensing agreements with major franchises, and retail distribution, would typically fetch a sale price somewhere in the high single digits to low tens of millions. Consumer product businesses commonly change hands at a multiple of profit rather than revenue, which is why the missing margin data matters so much.
Without audited financials, anything more precise than that band is a guess. The $7.5 million valuation remains the only number attached to a real negotiation.
How a $200 basement project became a multimillion-dollar company
Tiu and Zhang started The Woobles in July 2020 with roughly $200 of materials, working out of a basement in North Carolina after moving down from Brooklyn.
Both had walked away from corporate careers in 2018. Tiu had been a user experience designer at Google, working on education products, and had burned out after moving into a management role that did not suit her. Zhang had spent seven years on Wall Street, finishing as a director at Deutsche Bank. They met as undergraduates at Duke and married in 2021. Before The Woobles, they tried several business ideas that went nowhere.
The product came out of Tiu’s own frustration. She wanted to crochet a small stuffed animal as a gift, picked up a kit, and found the instructions assumed she already knew how to crochet. Rather than give up, she designed the thing she had wanted in the first place.
A Woobles kit arrives with the hardest part already done. The first rounds are pre-started, the yarn is a custom blend chosen because it does not fray, and the box includes the hook, stuffing, safety eyes, and stitch markers. A step-by-step video tutorial opens up once you buy. Tiu tested it the way she had tested software at Google, watching real beginners use the kit and removing whatever tripped them up.
Their parents became the unofficial first employees, assembling kits, packing boxes, and cutting yarn on a machine the two fathers ran in the basement. The company started on Etsy and moved to its own Shopify store the same year. For the first two years, the founders hired nobody.
Zhang’s advice to other founders runs against the usual startup instinct: do the things that do not scale first, because packing the orders yourself teaches you what you will need to know when you finally have to scale.
What actually makes the business valuable
Four things carry more weight than the headline revenue figure.
Licensing deals
Retail came early and by accident. A buyer from the Canadian grocery chain Loblaws approached them wanting to stock the kits, and the pair scrambled to work out large-order fulfilment and retail packaging on the fly. Saying yes before knowing how became a habit. In 2022 the pair went to the Licensing Expo in Las Vegas and discovered you needed appointments to pitch anyone. They spent three days working the receptionists outside the big brands’ sections until one let them in on the final day. That pitch produced their first licence, for Pac-Man. Peanuts, Harry Potter, Hello Kitty, and Minecraft followed. Licensed characters bring in buyers who were never shopping for a crochet kit to begin with, which is the cheapest kind of customer to reach.
A catalogue built for repeat buyers
The range now runs past 200 products, priced from $25 for a basic beginner kit to $350 for collector’s boxes. A first-time buyer who finishes a penguin has an obvious next purchase, and then another after that. That ladder is worth far more than a single strong seller.
Pricing that funds the tutorials
A single beginner kit runs around $30, and that price does draw complaints. Buy yarn, a hook, and stuffing separately and you will spend less. The kits sell anyway, because the thing being paid for is not the raw materials. It is the pre-started rounds, the yarn that will not fray while a beginner fights with it, and the video walkthrough that turns a hobby with a steep first hour into one anybody can finish in an afternoon. That margin above material cost is what pays for producing the tutorials in the first place.
The education layer
Every kit is tied to online tutorials, which is why the founders describe The Woobles as an ed-tech company rather than a craft brand. The pitch is not really yarn. It is the feeling of finishing something you assumed you could not do. Tiu has said the confidence boost she got from learning to crochet is what the whole business is built on.
Scale and reach
The founders estimate they have taught more than a million people to crochet. Kits are manufactured in China and shipped worldwide from a warehouse in Durham, North Carolina, and the full current range sits on The Woobles’ own store, which is where most of their sales still happen.
Do Justine Tiu and Adrian Zhang have separate net worths?
No verified personal net worth figure exists for either founder, and any specific number attached to their names online is invented.
What can be said is that they founded the company together and no outside investment has been confirmed. The Shark Tank money never arrived, which means there is no evidence any equity has been sold to anyone. Two founders holding all or nearly all of a business generating $5 million a year hold something genuinely valuable, but that value sits in the company rather than in a bank account. Founders of private businesses are usually far less liquid than the headline numbers suggest.
Both have also published books through Simon & Schuster, including beginner amigurumi pattern collections, which adds a modest income stream alongside the company.
The Shark Tank effect, without the Shark Tank money
The episode turned out to be worth more as advertising than as investment.
It aired on September 30, 2022, in front of a national audience, though Hurricane Ian knocked out coverage in parts of North Carolina and the founders spent their own watch party in a power cut. They had prepared for the traffic spike with a limited edition kit, a shark named Tank, which sold out the night the episode ran. Part of the proceeds went to shark conservation groups. Website visits, sales, and social following all jumped afterwards.
When the deal collapsed, the couple lost $450,000 they never received. What they kept was the 6 percent of the company they would have handed over, which at the agreed valuation was worth exactly the same $450,000. Two years later they placed 19th on the Inc. 5000, which suggests the loss of that cheque did not slow anything down.
Frequently asked questions
Did The Woobles actually get the Shark Tank money?
No. Tiu and Zhang agreed to $450,000 for 6 percent with Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner on air, but the deal never closed. Cuban later said the choice not to proceed was the founders’ own and that he did not know why.
How much does The Woobles make a year?
Around $5 million in annual revenue, with roughly 50 employees. That is money coming in, not profit. The company has never published its margins, so its actual earnings are not public.
Who owns The Woobles?
Justine Tiu and Adrian Zhang, a married couple who founded it in July 2020. No outside investment has been confirmed, and the Shark Tank investment never went through, so the founders appear to still hold the company.
Is The Woobles still in business in 2026?
Yes. The company operates from North Carolina, sells more than 200 products, and holds licensing deals with franchises including Peanuts, Harry Potter, Hello Kitty, and Minecraft.
Why do net worth figures for The Woobles vary so widely?
Because they measure different things. Low figures come from YouTube earnings calculators, high ones from applying assumed growth rates to the 2022 valuation. Only the $7.5 million valuation and the $5 million revenue figure trace back to real events.
Conclusion
The Woobles is worth about $7.5 million by its only public valuation, agreed on Shark Tank in 2022 in a deal that never closed. The company itself now turns over roughly $5 million a year with around 50 staff, and ranked 19th on the 2024 Inc. 5000. Treat any exact net worth figure as an estimate, because the business is private and has never published one. The growth, not the guesswork, is the real story.
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