In 2010 printmaker Andrea Lauren was putting her artwork on mirrors, calendars, buttons, and rings and selling them on Etsy. While browsing the Etsy forums one afternoon, a comment about the print-on-demand fabric company Spoonflower piqued her interest. She’d been searching for a way to print her art on fabric, and this seemed like the ideal solution.
Lauren drew a stylized grizzly bear, carved and printed a block, scanned it into her computer and began playing with creating a repeat pattern. “It started so simply and innocently without any plan,” she recalls. “That geometric animal design is still one of my best-selling prints.”
The bear motif’s popularity led to numerous requests from customers to make other animals in the same style, and very quickly Lauren became a regular Spoonflower user. Five years later she has approximately 250 designs in her Spoonflower shop, with dozens of colorways and coordinates adding up to well over 1,000 patterns for sale.
Today Andrea Lauren is Spoonflower’s #1 top seller by revenue, and fabric design has become a significant part of her career…(to find out more about Andrea read the rest of this piece on the Spoonflower blog where I’m a guest writer today.)
Thanks Abby for sharing this interesting post – Julie
As it happens, I have some of that bear fabric!