2010-People-powered Textile Design: How Spoonflower Approaches Fabric Printing

People-powered Textile Design: How Spoonflower Approaches Fabric Printing

Stephen Fraser, Spoonflower


Introduction

It's not often that a new business -- much less a textile business in Mebane, North
Carolina with no marketing budget and few resources -- gets attention from the New
York Times, NPR, the Associated Press, dozens of design magazines and hundreds of
blogs and web sites within a year of opening its doors.
Against all odds, Spoonflower -- the world's first web site to allow individuals to print and sell their own designs on fabric -- has managed in a short time to generate a tremendous amount of buzz, several imitators, and a community of over 80,000 designers. The intention of this presentation is to put the Spoonflower story into a useful context for others in the textile industry.