Webinar recap image that says "Artist Webinar: Spoonflower Biz Focus 2023" at the top with photos of Jane Sandor and Anjana Monhanty at the bottom
From left to right, Jane Sandor and Anjana Mohanty

Are you curious what Spoonflower is focused on in 2023? From top selling design styles to updates to the Spoonflower platform, Artist Community Manager, Jessie Katz Greenberg, recaps our January Artist Webinar featuring insights from Spoonflower’s Director of Merchandising & Category Management Jane Sandor and Head of Artist Platform & Services Anjana Mohanty. 

Jane Sandor 

Director of Merchandising & Category Management 

Jane Sandor leads Spoonflower’s Category Management and Merchandising teams. This includes sourcing raw materials, building product development specifications and staying ahead of trends to feature editor’s design picks on the right products.

During our first webinar of 2023, Jane reflected on sales, trends and top selling designs from 2022 and gave us a preview of what’s to come this year.  

Look Back at Sales and Trends of 2022 

Fabric

Fabric remains Spoonflower’s top selling category for now, making up 48% of sales in 2022. The #1 product in fabric was Petal Signature Cotton® followed by Minky, Linen Cotton Canvas, Cotton Poplin and Organic Cotton Sateen

Wallpaper

Wallpaper continues to be a strong growing category for Spoonflower making up 41% of sales in 2022, and we don’t see this growth stopping anytime soon. We’re starting to see entire rooms covered in wallpaper, and wallpaper paired with matching curtains. Peel and Stick leads this category, but we see a lot of growth in commercial wallpaper, like Non-Pasted Traditional Pebble, for residential and commercial spaces. 

Home Decor

Home decor made up 11% of sales in 2022 and is growing every day. Bedding leads the category, which also includes curtains, pillows and table linens

2022 Top Selling Designs in Fabric, Wallpaper and Home Decor 

In fabric we continue to see florals, colorful designs and nursery themes in the top sellers.  

Three rows, each showing six thumbnails of top selling fabric designs of 2022. These designs include brightly colored watercolor dragons, midcentury cats, muted Victorian florals, pastel baby animals perfect for nursery decor, orange and pink retro florals, and multi colored vector illustrated jellyfish.
Shop top selling fabric designs of 2022

In wallpaper, we see dark and moody designs starting to rise to the top. Popular motifs include birds, mushrooms, florals and exotic animals. Large scale designs do well here, while smaller scale designs tend to perform better in fabric. 

Three rows, each showing six wallpaper mockups of top selling wallpaper designs of 2022. These designs are overall a bit more muted with boho oversized florals, gray and white herringbone, black and white cranes, mushrooms illustrated on a moody dark background, and dogs surrounded by flowers.
Shop top selling wallpaper designs of 2022

For home decor, we see large and extra-large scales succeed, especially in bedding, which is the number one area for growth in this category.  

Three rows, each showing six duvet cover mockups, and one tea towel, of top selling home decor designs of 2022. These designs are mostly large scale, including Victorian and Art Nouveau florals, blue and white tigers, colorful geometric shapes and traditional vines in a stripe pattern.
Shop top selling home decor designs of 2022

What’s New in 2023? 

With bedding showing so much opportunity for growth, it should be no surprise that we are working on even more bedding options! Crib, Twin XL and California King are sizes that we’re exploring. We’ve taken a deep dive into our bedding products to finesse the fit and trim details to make sure we have the absolute best product to take to market. Our Product Development team isn’t just shopping catalogs of blank products. We truly specify each detail to make a custom product at Spoonflower.  

The Product Development team is also hard at work exploring prototypes for new curtain options, including blackout, linen and velvet.  

In addition to new products, we also want to create a better way to shop. The Merchandising team is working on a curated shopping experience that will allow customers to shop an entire look. They will be able to see and fall in love with a curated bedding look and easily navigate to add the duvet cover, coordinating pillows and sheet sets into their cart to recreate the look in their own home. 

Key Styles for 2023 

Eight square images, each showing a different key style segment. Niche Antique incorporates art nouveau style wallpaper. Bold Retro showcases a stack of fabric with retro floral and geometric designs. Traditional showcases a light colored bedding set in white, green and blue. Clean & Simple is a room with a gray and white geometric rug. Dark and Moody uses floral wallpaper with a dark background. Wild Glamour features a duvet cover with illustrated pink tigers on a bright blue background. Eclectic Boho mixes and matches table runners and napkins in florals and geometric designs. Dopamine Rush includes six curtain panels each with a different bright color and pattern.
Key Styles for 2023

Emerson Jones, Spoonflower’s Senior Merchandising Manager, has identified eight styles that will continue to grow in our wallpaper and home decor categories. She’s referenced top selling designs, newly uploaded designs, and industry leading trend resources to pull these styles together. 

• Niche Antique 
• Bold Retro 
• Traditional 
• Clean & Simple 
• Dark & Moody 
• Wild Glamour 
• Eclectic Boho 
• Dopamine Rush 

Spoonflower is focused on featuring these eight style segments throughout the year, and you’ll continue to see new looks within these segments as well. 


Anjana Mohanty 

Head of Artist Platform & Services  

With a product engineering left-brain masterfully intertwined with a decidedly right-brained instinct for what Spoonflower’s 3.3 million creatives want and need, Anjana moved from heading up Spoonflower’s design platform onto home goods (Roostery) to VP positions in both Engineering and Finished Goods and Product Engineering to now serving as the Head of Artist Platform & Services.

During our webinar Anjana outlined what Spoonflower’s Product and Engineering teams are focused on in 2023. 

Product and Engineering is Focused on the Spoonflower Artist Experience 

In 2022, we introduced two separate Product and Engineering organizations, including one specifically focused on the artist experience. These two organizations, Artist Platform & Services and E-Commerce & Shopping, each have robust teams including Product Management, User Experience, User Interface Design and Engineering. This organizational change allows us to focus on the services that specifically benefit the Spoonflower artist community. 

Artist Platform & Services Updates for 2023 

We plan to introduce an update to the tax verification process, working with a new partner who will ensure a smoother pathway to setting up your shop on Spoonflower. 

Design Challenges will also receive an update in 2023. Weekly Design Challenges have been a staple here at Spoonflower for many years, hosted on our own platform. We plan to address common feedback that will make the Design Challenges platform easier for artists, voters and admins here at Spoonflower to navigate.   

Design Listing Enrichment 

The information and images included in a design listing can make a big difference in your design being discovered, and we want to make that easier to understand. For example, tags that are added by artists don’t always correlate to what customers are searching for. We want to solve for that by making it easier for artists to add tags that match customer searches.  

We also plan to refresh product images. As a print on demand marketplace, we rely on computer generated imagery to showcase artists’ designs on Spoonflower products, but we still want to compete with more traditional home decor and fabric sites that can photograph everything. We look forward to testing image options to ensure they are what customers are attracted to, in turn increasing the rate at which they purchase. 

Design Creation and Management 

Again, looking at frequent artist feedback we plan to address common issues around design upload including that the proofing process is confusing and takes too long and it can be difficult to know which products your design is available on.  

These are big changes that we plan to release in phases. Be sure to watch the webinar replay (below) at minute 27:00 to see Anjana walk through what her team is exploring for the first release. 

Colorways A/B Test 

The E-Commerce & Shopping team is currently running a test which allows shoppers to view up to 24 colorways of a design on one product page. These are colorways created by artists that already exist in the Spoonflower Marketplace. We believe this will improve the shopping experience, and specifically we’ll be measuring the rate at which customers add to cart from product pages that include multiple colorways, compared to product pages that do not.  

A fabric product page on Spoonflower.com shows a colorful watercolor dragon design on fabric. On the right side under the price there are twenty four small circle showing 24 different colorways available of the design.
A screenshot of the colorways test shows 24 different colorways available for Dragon Fire Rainbow by adenaj.

The results of this test, as with any test we perform here at Spoonflower, help to inform our prioritization. There are many things we could be working on at any time and we want to make sure we are working on things that will have the biggest impact on our Spoonflower community. 

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