5 lessons learned from my first year on Spoonflower

Can new artists really succeed on Spoonflower?

If you’re new to Spoonflower or thinking about setting up a shop you may be wondering whether it is worth the time and effort and more importantly, whether there is room for new artists to make any money on this platform.

I was brand new to surface pattern design when I set up my shop on Spoonflower, just over a year ago, in March of 2023.

It has been a steep learning curve for me with many highs and lows but despite a slow start, there are a few lessons I learnt quite quickly which helped me make around 200 sales in the first twelve months.

For anyone starting out, I hope these pointers may give you a few tips if things are a bit slow in your shop or help you decide whether this platform may be right for you.

1. The Design Challenges are the best way to get seen and to make sales

I have put this first because I think as a new artist on the platform this is the BEST way to get eyes on your designs and ultimately to get sales.

I decided when I opened my shop to enter every design challenge in the first year. When I started there was a new challenge every week so this was quite a commitment! But I am SO glad I stuck to this.

Nearly all my sales in the first year were originally entries to one of the challenges. I’m a few months over the year mark now and the more challenges I enter the more the sales pick up.  

If you only manage to add one pattern to your shop every other week it would be worth designing them according to the design challenge brief. Spoonflower chooses the theme based on what is trending on the platform so it is a great way to create patterns that people are already looking for.

2. It takes a while to start making consistent sales

When I started on Spoonflower I had only just begun making patterns - I made my first repeating pattern a couple of weeks before I opened my shop. If like me you are opening a shop with no bank of patterns to upload it can take a long time to get your shop established.

On a platform like Spoonflower it makes sense that the more patterns you have in your shop, the more likely it is for you to make a sale. So don’t be discouraged if the first few months are slow.

When I started, I chose Spoonflower out of all the other Print On Demand sites to work on exclusively, figuring that it would be better to pour my time into one thing and do it well than try a few and not have time to master them properly. It takes a lot of work to learn how the platform works, enter design challenges, upload new designs frequently and keep on top of the trends.

My first six months were very slow (I mean I earned under $5 for four of those months!) But I persisted in uploading and entering challenges. As I did this I was improving all the time and in month 8 I hit the 1% bonus for the first time which was a huge encouragement to keep going!

3. Design with wallpaper in mind

If you’re looking to maximise your royalties (which I guess we all are!) it’s a good idea to design with wallpaper in mind, as wallpaper is the most expensive item for people to buy and it brings in the largest royalties.

This means designing on a larger scale.

I design exclusively on the Procreate app and I always use a canvas size of 12x12 inch at 300dpi.

When you upload your designs to Spoonflower, it will automatically change the dpi to 150 and this means if you have uploaded a design in 300dpi it will make the design twice as big. (So a 12x12 inch canvas at 300dpi becomes 24x24 inch at 150dpi.) The wallpaper on Spoonflower needs to have a 24 inch repeat so this size works perfectly!

Once you have uploaded it on a large scale it’s also a good idea to add some smaller sizes of the same design for people buying fabric.

I tend to add a large, medium and small of each design. This also feels like an easy way to add more items to your shop without creating new patterns from scratch. In the description of each pattern I usually write that it is available in other sizes so people can go and find it if they need a different size.

4. Spoonflower is a great way to test and improve your style as an artist

It’s important to have a growth mindset and to be open to improving and changing your style as you progress as an artist on Spoonflower. As a brand new surface pattern designer when I started out on the platform, I was very aware that I had a long way to go and there was a LOT of room for improvement in my designs!

Seeing what sells, and what does well in the design challenges is such a great way to work out what you are doing well and what you need to improve on.

If your placements in the design challenges are disappointing, study the winning designs and work out what these designers are doing that you are not. Are they using more texture? Perhaps a more limited palette? Or maybe their pattern layouts are more sophisticated.

Rather than being discouraged, and falling into the comparison trap, take inspiration from the many talented designers on the platform and learn from them!

I still try to use the Design Challenges to improve my style and I treat each one as a learning opportunity. (My placements in the challenges this year have ranged from 2nd place to 656th place and everything in between!)

If something works, I do it again!

If it doesn’t I try something new next time.

5. Provide colour and size variations of your patterns to maximise sales

I didn’t learn this one for a while and it probably lost me some sales!

As you can buy designs on fabric, wallpaper and home décor on Spoonflower, there is a lot of variation in the size of designs people are looking for. For example if you are making a child’s skirt you are going to want much smaller motifs than if you are buying wallpaper.

Equally, someone may love one of your designs but it might be in a colour they hate or that doesn’t go with the aesthetic they are looking for.

Therefore it’s important to add both size and colour variations to your patterns.

Depending on the software you use and how you have created your pattern, colour variations can be tricky. If you are working on Procreate it can sometimes be a challenge to change the colours but if you’re careful with your layers and have colour changes in your mind from the start it is definitely possible!

This is one of my best selling patterns which came 2nd in the Welcoming Walls design challenge. I added two more colour variations which now also sell regularly. Each colour has 3 sizes, so for one pattern I now have 9 variations which all sell.

If you add identical designs in different palettes Spoonflower will automatically add them as colour variations for people to click on. (Sometimes this doesn’t happen straight away though, it can take the platform some time to work out the pattern is the same)

Take a look at this post if you’d like a detailed step by step of how I rescale and upload multiple scales to Spoonflower.

So is Spoonflower worth it for new designers?

This year has proved to me that there is definitely room for new designers on Spoonflower.

If you are committed to taking part in the challenges, learning and improving your skills and spending the time making and uploading patterns on a regular basis then it is certainly worth opening a shop!

However, getting to a point of regular sales takes hours of work and for me has taken many months! There are certainly people who can do it much faster, I have no doubt, but I was actually learning how to illustrate and create patterns as I went along so I knew from the start my shop would never be an overnight success.

At just over the one year mark, I'm really happy with where my sales are at on Spoonflower, but of course I’d still like to see more growth!

In the next year my plan is to continue learning, improving, entering challenges and working on my style. I hope that by this time next year I will be able to look back and see the same amount of progress in my work and in my shop!

If you have found this article helpful, have a Spoonflower tip that would help others, or would like to ask a question, leave a comment in the comment box and I’ll get back to you!