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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Hello, I would like to be informed when things like this happen, for the moment I’m in a listing that receives people who want to buy from Spoonflower, but this content is for people who want to design for them and would much rather receive this information.
Thank you!
Hi Aby! And great question!
You can change your email preferences at this link >> https://preferences.spoonflower.com/subscribe/index.html.
Thanks!
Betsy
Spoonflower
I am wanting to have an original design printed on quilting cotton. I don’t know how to go about it. What will the cost be?
Hi Cindy! And what exciting news!
In order to get your design printed, you’ll need to upload it to Spoonflower. You can read about how to do that here: https://support.spoonflower.com/hc/en-us/articles/204600314-Uploading-Images.
If you’d like to make your design for sale for others to purchase, you’ll need to buy a proof swatch before it’s made for sale. You can read all about making your designs for sale here: https://support.spoonflower.com/hc/en-us/articles/7628755642381.
If you’d like to use Petal Signature Cotton, you can read about that substrate and price here: https://www.spoonflower.com/en/petal-signature-cotton.
In case you’d like to explore the other types of fabric we offer, you can check them all out at this link: https://www.spoonflower.com/en/fabric-shop.
Hope that helps!
Best,
Betsy
Spoonflower