The American city most curious about craft classes, per person, is not New York or Los Angeles. It is New Haven, Connecticut — with Atlanta four-tenths of a point behind. That is the headline of the first KraftStories Craft Curiosity Index: a ranking of U.S. cities by how much craft-class interest they generate per resident, built from twelve months of visits to our own site and normalized against official Census population counts.
We built this to answer a question we get asked constantly — “when are you opening in my city?” — with data instead of anecdotes. The index below deliberately excludes every city where we already operate. What is left is a map of unserved demand: places whose residents keep researching craft workshops, mosaic lamps, rug tufting and terrarium classes at rates that rival or beat our own home markets, with no studio like ours in the metro.
One method note before the table, because a ranking is only as good as its discipline: sessions are divided by 2020 Census population, only cities of 100,000+ are ranked, ambiguous city names (your Londons, Salems and Vancouvers) were excluded rather than guessed, and known data-center geographies that pollute analytics — looking at you, Ashburn, Virginia — were screened out. The full rules, and everything the rules cost us, are at the end.
The Craft Curiosity Index: top 20 cities we don't serve yet
Sessions to kraftstories.com per 100,000 residents, September 2025 – August 2026, cities with no KraftStories studio in the metro.
| Rank | City | Sessions (12 mo) | Population (2020 Census) | Sessions per 100k |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New Haven, CT | 218 | 134,023 | 162.7 |
| 2 | Atlanta, GA | 809 | 498,715 | 162.2 |
| 3 | Salt Lake City, UT | 299 | 199,723 | 149.7 |
| 4 | Seattle, WA | 958 | 737,015 | 130.0 |
| 5 | Charleston, SC | 175 | 150,227 | 116.5 |
| 6 | Miami, FL | 461 | 442,241 | 104.2 |
| 7 | Orlando, FL | 320 | 307,573 | 104.0 |
| 8 | Boston, MA | 692 | 675,647 | 102.4 |
| 9 | Lowell, MA | 104 | 115,554 | 90.0 |
| 10 | Gainesville, FL | 124 | 141,085 | 87.9 |
| 11 | Denver, CO | 622 | 715,522 | 86.9 |
| 12 | Inglewood, CA | 91 | 107,762 | 84.4 |
| 13 | Syracuse, NY | 124 | 148,620 | 83.4 |
| 14 | Los Angeles, CA* | 3,187 | 3,898,747 | 81.7 |
| 15 | Brandon, FL (Tampa metro) | 93 | 114,626 | 81.1 |
| 16 | Lexington-Fayette, KY | 259 | 322,570 | 80.3 |
| 17 | Allen, TX | 83 | 104,627 | 79.3 |
| 18 | Pittsburgh, PA | 236 | 302,971 | 77.9 |
| 19 | Tallahassee, FL | 150 | 196,169 | 76.5 |
| 20 | Provo, UT | 86 | 115,162 | 74.7 |
*Los Angeles is about 40 miles from our Irvine studio — treat it as a near-market rather than pure whitespace. Charleston clears our name-disambiguation rule narrowly (a small share of “Charleston” traffic could be West Virginian), and Brandon, FL shares its label with Brandon, Manitoba, so read its exact rank loosely. Ranks 21 and down — Dallas, Hartford, Minneapolis, Chicago, Madison and a hundred more — are in the methodology appendix we keep on file; ask and we will share the full table.
What the index says
College towns punch far above their weight. The signature of this index is not megacities — it is university-anchored, mid-size metros. New Haven (Yale) is #1, Gainesville (Florida) #10, Syracuse #13, Tallahassee (Florida State) #19, Provo (BYU) #20, with Ann Arbor and Madison close behind the top 20. Wherever there are students, grad workers and young faculty, there is per-capita craft demand.
Utah is the strongest state signal in the country. Salt Lake City at #3 and Provo at #20 make Utah the only state with two top-20 cities outside our markets — consistent with the state's famous DIY culture. Someone should be running mosaic lamp nights in Salt Lake City. It is currently not us.
Florida shows up five times with zero studios. Miami, Orlando, Gainesville, Brandon and Tallahassee all make the top 20 — broad, distributed demand across a state where we have no presence at all.
The Northeast corridor is the densest cluster of unserved demand. New Haven #1, Boston #8, Lowell #9, then Hartford, Providence, Stamford, Bridgeport and Worcester all above the big-city median — a two-hour Amtrak stretch where craft curiosity keeps beating the national baseline.
Per-capita demand skews away from the Sun Belt giants. San Antonio, Tulsa, Fresno, Mesa, Albuquerque, Memphis and Tucson — millions of residents between them — close out the bottom of the full list at a fifth of New Haven's rate. Big absolute populations, thin relative interest.
How our own markets compare
For scale, the same metric in the cities where we do operate: Honolulu, our home base, runs at 6,842 sessions per 100k — home-field dominance plus statewide brand gravity. Irvine runs at 954, New York at 185, San Jose at 129, San Francisco at 101 — and Austin, our newest market, at just 41, below fifteen of the cities in the table above. That last number is the uncomfortable, useful kind: the index does not care about our expansion plans.
What we excluded, and why you should care
Most traffic-based city rankings are quietly ruined by two things: data centers and ambiguous names. We took both seriously, because a ranking we publish under our own name has to survive someone checking it.
Data-center and geolocation artifacts. Ashburn, Virginia — the heart of “Data Center Alley” — generated more sessions than Seattle, at 2,628 per 100k residents. It is bots, and it is excluded, along with Boardman OR, Council Bluffs IA, The Dalles OR, Prineville OR, Moses Lake WA, Cheyenne WY and other hyperscale-cloud towns. Three tiny Hawaiian towns (Kalaheo, Lanai City, Kaunakakai) logged tens of thousands of sessions per 100k — Hawaiian ISP geolocation pooling, not 3,000-person towns discovering rug tufting — and were removed the same way. Two cities that passed every numeric screen, Des Moines and Hampton VA, were still withheld on documented circumstantial evidence; their figures are preserved in our methodology file so anyone can reinstate them.
Ambiguous names. “London” sent us 1,185 sessions; none of it counts toward London, Kentucky. A city name entered the index only when exactly one U.S. city of 100,000+ carries it, at three times the population of any namesake, with no comparable foreign city sharing the label. That rule cost us some tantalizing rows — Vancouver would rank near the top if its sessions were Washington's, Athens would if they were Georgia's — and we accepted every loss, documented, rather than guess.
Methodology
The metric is sessions to kraftstories.com per 100,000 residents: 12 months of our first-party Google Analytics traffic (September 2025 – August 2026, sessions by city) divided by official 2020 Census place-level population counts retrieved from the U.S. Census Bureau, ×100,000. Only U.S. cities of 100,000+ residents are ranked; cities in our own studio metros are reported separately, not in the index; ambiguous city labels and data-center geographies are excluded under the rules above, with every exclusion and its numbers logged. Sessions measure visits, not unique people, and analytics city data concentrates metro traffic into principal-city labels, so treat the index as a ranking of relative curiosity, not a census of crafters. We recomputed the top five against July 2025 population estimates and the order does not change. Verified 31 August 2026; we will re-run the index annually.
To cite this page: KraftStories (2026). The Craft Curiosity Index 2026. https://kraftstories.com/blogs/diy-and-crafts/craft-curiosity-index. The traffic data is ours; population denominators are U.S. Census Bureau 2020 counts. Journalists: we are happy to share the full 100+ city table and the exclusion log — contact us.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Craft Curiosity Index?
A per-capita ranking of U.S. cities by craft-class interest: 12 months of visits to kraftstories.com by city, divided by 2020 Census population, for cities of 100,000+ where we have no studio. The 2026 edition ranks New Haven, Atlanta and Salt Lake City top three.
Why should anyone trust a ranking built on your own traffic?
Because we show the work: the metric, the floor, the name-disambiguation rule, and every excluded city with its numbers — including the data-center towns that would otherwise fake the top of the list. Our traffic is a proxy for craft-class interest, not a national survey, and the page says so.
Does this mean you are opening studios in these cities?
It means these are the cities the demand data argues for. New Haven, Atlanta and Salt Lake City were not on our whiteboard before this analysis; Austin — where we do operate — ranks below fifteen of them per capita. The index is now part of that conversation, which is exactly why we built it.
Can I get the full table?
Yes — the full list runs past 100 cities, and we share it with anyone writing about craft demand, retail whitespace or the experience economy. Cite this page as the source.
KraftStories runs in-person craft workshops in Midtown NYC, NYC Financial District, Honolulu, San Francisco, San Jose, Irvine and Austin, and live virtual workshops worldwide with kits shipped to participants. If your city is on this list, the virtual studio is how we serve it today — and our own numbers live in the KraftStories Data Report.
