Irene Hoofs was working as a banker when she decided that numbers were not the medium she wanted to spend her life working in. She retrained as a graphic designer, started one of the Netherlands' early design blogs, and gradually found her way into the world of fiber arts — knitting, weaving, embroidery, macramé, punch needling — the entire ecosystem of making things with yarn, thread, and textile. The magazine she eventually built from that journey, KOEL, became the publication she wished had existed when she first picked up a skein of wool and wondered what to do with it.
KOEL launched as a quarterly print magazine with a proposition that was simple but, in the craft publishing world, surprisingly rare: present fiber art with the visual sophistication of a design magazine. Each issue featured maker interviews, curated tool and supply recommendations, home décor trends translated into yarn projects, and photography that treated a hand-woven wall hanging with the same respect a fashion magazine would give a couture gown. The aesthetic was clean, modern, and deliberately distant from the doily-and-grandmother associations that have long kept textile craft magazines in a visual ghetto.
Hoofs' own life has been a case study in modern nomadism. She has lived and worked in Amsterdam, London, New York, Toronto, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and now Dubai, where she runs KOEL from a renovated atelier near the Design District. That global trajectory has shaped the magazine's perspective: the makers profiled come from Seoul and Santiago de Compostela, from upstate New York and the Netherlands, from anywhere that people are doing interesting things with fiber. After twelve print issues sold in hundreds of stores worldwide, Hoofs transitioned the publication to a digital platform called KOEL Kiosk — a decision driven partly by environmental concerns and partly by the recognition that a global community of makers is best served by a format that doesn't depend on international shipping.
The digital shift has not diminished the editorial ambition. The platform publishes extended stories, video interviews, patterns, and tutorials, adding new content monthly. For Hoofs, who still weaves behind her own loom when she's not editing, the throughline has always been the same: fiber art is not a hobby but a practice, one that connects contemporary makers to centuries of accumulated knowledge and offers, in a world of screens and speed, a form of creative meditation that nothing digital can replicate. KOEL exists to celebrate the people who understand this — and to welcome those who are just beginning to.
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