Video 3 of 3: How to sell pattern designs on Spoonflower + BONUS Tips and Tricks

By Oksancia, owner of Oksancia Textile Design Studio, 27 June, 2018

In this video, I am going to talk about my experience and sharing my review of selling my repeat pattern designs on Spoonflower. What is Spoonflower? It’s a custom fabric online marketplace with a great selection of different not only fabrics, but also wallpaper, and gift wrapping paper. Their digital print process uses water-based pigment inks and dyes in a more eco-friendly manner. Their concept is that independent artists/designers can make their designs available for sale at Spoonflower marketplace and receive commissions when the custom repeat pattern fabric is sold. I signed up for Spoonflower in 2010 while living in the Netherlands. I had a great experience with their printing quality and shipment times while living in Europe and now in California. Here is my Spoonflower fabric shop. As of this moment, I have 318 repeat pattern designs available on my Spoonflower shop some of them are color versions of the same design. To make your designs available you need to: 1) Save them in the proper format. 2) Upload them to the website. 3) Write name, description, and tags. 4) Purchase a swatch to test the quality of the print. I always add batches of my repeat patterns at once and order swatch samples of whole collections of 30 pattern designs at once. This has been the most ccost-effectiveway for me. Even with this investment in this part of my creative business and not very active uploading schedule, I still earn a nice commission as a bonus to my other work earnings. The earnings have been growing steadily throughout these years and stay rather stable during the year if I’ve been adding new designs or not. I often receive requests to resize or recolor patterns for specific purposes. My patterns have been used on many DIY craft projects and I’m always happy to see them. I used my patterns from my California fabric collection in my tote bag project and a baby blanket for my daughter. As a big part of my work is creating custom vector repeat patterns for freelance client projects, I had quite a few of my customers come to me after finding my designs via Spoonflower. This is my story of my experience of 6 years+ selling on Spoonflower. I plan to do more experiments with Spoonflower this year so stay tuned for my updates 🙂   And here is the 4th BONUS video 😉 I looooove bonuses!

If you are a Spoonflower seller or a textile designer or surface pattern designer looking to sell your repeat pattern designs online, here are my top 5 Spoonflower tips for textile designers, surface pattern designers, and Spoonflower sellers. Learn how to save money on Spoonflower and a better way how to post designs for sale on Spoonflower.

I am talking about:

TRICK 1 – How to order proofs of your designs much cheaper and save a lot of money while posting your repeat pattern designs for sale. Save a lot on pattern proofs!
You will pay $0.42 instead of $5 per fabric swatch. Spoonflower Fill-A-Yard: http://tinyurl.com/y7vwftf2

TRICK 2 – Write that you are available for freelance projects
in design descriptions.

TRICK 3 – Spoonflower magazine: Request to receive a paper issue of Spoonflower magazine for free! (US designers only)
OR
Read digital issues here: https://www.spoonflower.com/2018-spring-magazine

TRICK 4 – Try all fabrics and some papers with $3 fabric sample pack here: https://www.spoonflower.com/fabric-sample-pack

TRICK 5 – Join awesome Spoonflower Fans facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SpoonflowerFans/

I am not affiliated with Spoonflower other than being a loyal seller and customer since 2009.

Hope this video was helpful for you to get you started using Spoonflower better, how to use Spoonflower tips, how to save money on Spoonflower, and market your surface pattern design services. Thanks for watching!

#GrowLoveCreate

Oksancia

P.S. Thank you for learning with me in this fun Selling Your Designs Online video series! If you are interested in my systems how I create vector repeat patterns in Adobe Illustrator fast, please watch this playlist. I will stay in touch via email with latest video tutorials and news. Wishing you the best on your creative journey! 🙂