[Above: rutabaga slices carved for printmaking purposes and a digital textile design using motifs created by printing with the rutabaga slices on paper.]

Back in 2008 Spoonflower altered forever the landscape of small-quantity on-demand fabric printiing. By offering digital printing at prices affordable to artists, hobbyists, and small crafts businesses, Spoonflower changed not only what can be done (and done by whom) with cloth, but also what’s likely to be done, both for pleasure and for profit. Commercial inkjet printing for fabric has been on the horizon for decades – see Danielle Locastro’s essay at first2print.com for an analysis oriented toward the garment industry – but only recently available at artist-friendly prices. In the past designers who wanted to see a repeat pattern printed on fabric had to: (1) sell or license the pattern to a business, (2) pay $100/yard or more to a commercial digital printer that bundled digital editing and/or color-matching services in with the printing, or (3) resort to low-tech printing devices. And by “low tech” I mean everything from finicky consumer-priced inkjet printers to silkscreen to linocut blocks to Javanese wax-printing tjaps to rubber stamps to paper stencils to the lowly potato (or rutabaga). Spoonflower’s affordable printing service changes everything; it’s what’s known, in business terminology, as a “disruptive technology.”

[Above: two more digital rutabaga prints, rendered in randomly chosen colors from Spoonflower's downloadable color swatch

Every printing process has its special aesthetic appeal, and fabric designers will no doubt continue to print and experiment with all the traditional low-tech methods. And, of course, they’ll continue to produce repeat patterns with the mass appeal needed for profitable mass production. But the services of Spoonflower (and its emerging competitors in the affordable custom-printing marketplace) will surely help shape the future of printed fabric design. Patterns bubbling up from hobbyists and artists/craftspeople will mingle in unforeseeable ways with those created strictly for mass production. That’s the nature of disruptive technology: game-changing, fascinating, and potentially disruptive. As far as “disruptive” goes, I guess I’ll just say that I’m glad I haven’t invested all my hopes in a business making old-fashioned rutabaga prints! The Spoonflower-enabled competition might be fierce.

Well, that’s an example (albeit a contrived and ridiculous one) of how affordable high-tech fabric printing could undercut a hypothetical low-tech printing business. What about Spoonflower’s new design marketplace? What effect will it have on person-to-person sales of digital repeat patterns outside the Spoonflower marketplace? Up till now these patterns have mostly been created and sold for non-textile purposes – as backgrounds for web pages, textures for 3D-computer-modeling, etc. But there are some at designs at patternhead.com and at istockphoto.com (find them at istockphoto by searching on “seamless pattern”) entirely suitable for printing on fabric. Will people go to the trouble of searching out these designs, paying for them, and uploading them to Spoonflower, if they can get similar designs right at the Spoonflower site with no trouble and no extra payment at all? The Spoonflower design marketplace benefits designers by providing them with a free place to show their work to a highly interested audience, by paying generous royalties on fabric actually printed, and by allowing them to retain copyright to their work. And, at the same time Spoonflower poses a serious challenge to designers hoping to set up shop independently in the just-barely-emerging person-to-person textile design market. It will be interesting to see how this challenge plays out.

I will be writing more on this. And also on Spoonflower’s textile design software that, I read somewhere (can’t recall where, just now), may be in the works.