Spoonflower review. How to sell fabric pattern designs on Spoonflower fabric, wallpaper, wrapping paper.
Click to watch the video here.
This post was updated slightly on November 30, 2018. Video stayed the same 🙂
Hi, my amazing, creative friends! Today, I am sharing my experience with selling my repeat pattern designs on a print-on-demand website 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.
I am NOT sponsored by Spoonflower and I don’t work for them. I am just a customer and a seller on their platform sharing my experience.
Here is my Spoonflower fabric shop: http://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/oksancia
You can see here the most popular designs that have been selling the best over the last years 🙂 I was informed that my elephant fabric got a following in the DIY cloth diaper community 😀 Love it!
The vegetable design was created many years ago for a Spoonflower contest and placed second. Since then it has been selling regularly as well.
As of this moment, I have 344 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 the 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 cost-effective way 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 the 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 🙂
If you have any questions or experience with this topic, please share them with all of us in the comments below.
★ BONUS WORKBOOK: GROW YOUR PATTERN PORTFOLIO 15x FASTER: Want to learn my system for growing your repeat pattern portfolio 15x faster? Request my bonus workbook.
Thank you so much for watching and reading!
Grow, love and create!
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