Free Swatch Day On Spoonflower

Spoonflower's First Free Swatch Day: Thursday, August 20, 2009

Get free, custom fabric swatches for 24 hours between midnight and 11:59 pm Eastern Standard Time on August 20, 2009.

What do I do? This offer is limited to two swatches per customer. To activate the discount, just add a swatch-sized piece of fabric of any design in your Spoonflower account to your shopping cart and proceed to checkout. The discount will be automatically subtracted from your cart total. Note that in order to receive your swatches, you need to follow the transaction through to the order confirmation page. [And yes, shipping is free, too.]

Try us for the first time! If you're new to Spoonflower this is a great chance to test the quality of our fabric and our printing for free. Just go to the Spoonflower home page, click Get Started, upload one or more designs, click on your design and then follow the instructions above.

Check out our new fabrics! Those of you who have been with us a while can use this as a chance to test color on new designs or to try out one of our new fabrics, which include Organic Interlock Cotton Knit and a Bamboo-Cotton Poplin. [Read more about fabrics here.]

Putting Our Crafty Community to Good Use: Heifer International

Spoonflower is still a tiny startup company, which means we don't yet have much in the way of extra cash that we can direct toward organizations that promote ideas we value like sustainability.

But we are wealthy in one sense -- we have access to a large, well networked community of amazing people who use our Web site (about 40,000 last time we counted). So we've decided to give everyone who takes advantage of Free Swatch Day on Spoonflower the option to take the $5 they would customarily have paid for a swatch and instead to make a donation to Heifer International, an organization that provides livestock, training and services to small farmers and communities around the world.

When you enter the shopping cart with your free swatch you'll see a donation box on the check out page where you can fill in any amount you'd like to donate to Heifer.org, click a donate button, and see the donation amount added to your cart total.

We'll report on the amount raised throughout the day on our Twitter feed as well as on the Spoonflower blog once it's all over.

Questions?

What is a swatch and why aren't they always free? A swatch in this case is an 8 x 8 inch square of fabric custom printed with your design. Printed swatches normally cost $5 each. If you just want a swatch of unprinted fabric to see what it's like, we can send you that anytime for free. Just put in a request here.

Can I email you an image to print? To take us up on our offer you have to use Spoonflower to create and order your swatch. That means uploading your (original) design or photo to a Spoonflower account, choosing your fabric and repeat style, and checking out using the instructions listed above.

Do I have to make a donation to Heifer? A donation of any sort is entirely optional. If you have another organization you'd like to support with a $5 donation, do that instead.

How can I track my donation? The downside of raising money through Spoonflower is that we can't really offer you the ability to monitor and track your donation. We'll keep everyone informed about what we're doing on our blog, but if you want real accountability then by all means head on over to Heifer.org and make a donation yourself on their secure site. We won't take it personally at all.