earth

You Can’t Spell Earth Without Art! At Spoonflower, this statement couldn't be more true. Everyday, we’re printing beautiful designs created by talented artists (maybe you!) to send out to customers all over the globe. While we are a small team of creative individuals, the Spoonflower team strongly believes in the importance of protecting the earth we live on! We’ve highlighted just a few ways Spoonflower employees are exercising their green thumb, and as our company grows, we continue to look for new ways to make green choices.

 

Community Garden

When you come visit the Spoonflower office, the first thing to greet you at the entrance are two small garden plots, full of fresh fruits, veggies and flowers. On an early Monday morning, these flowers are the perfect way to brighten up the start of the week and as you leave on a Friday evening, the cherry tomatoes you pop in your mouth closes the chapter on another productive week! With a team of weekly waterers, the responsibility of tending to the garden is shared between various Spoonflower team members but everyone can enjoys the benefits when adding fresh basil to your salad at lunch.We love seeing our fabric come to life! Strawberry Gold by Emily Sandford is the perfect companion to a strawberry from the Spoonflower garden. 

Blankets for Good

Have you ever reached out to the Spoonflower help team because you had to unexpectedly cancel an order? At Spoonflower, we print every piece of fabric, wallpaper and gift wrap on-demand, when you place your order, which means we don’t keep a physical inventory to place returned or cancelled items. If you’re like me, I know what you’re wondering …. “What do we do with returned and cancelled fabric?”

Earlier this year, the sustainability committee created Blankets for Good, a quarterly employee sew-in that uses returned marketplace fabric (don't worry, we will never use your private fabrics!) to make blankets to donate to local and international charities. This past May, the Spoonflower employees came together and sent blankets to help those affected by the earthquakes in Nepal and in July, team members sewed 30 blankets for the Inter-Faith Council for Social Service located just minutes from headquarters.  

Employee Sew-Ins are the perfect way to make a difference in the community while recycling fabric that can’t be sold!

Reusable Cloth Napkins

With yards and yards of beautifully printed fabric surrounding Spoonflower employees everyday, many of us would be lying if we didn’t say we had a fabric hoarding problem (admitting it is the first step, right?). As you may know from experience, large amounts of fabric stashed away in the craft closet results in large amounts of fabric scraps. To many, sending these scraps to the garbage would be the next step but for the eco-friendly minded folks at Spoonflower, we turn our fabric scraps into reusable napkins! To create your own, simply take pinking shears to the border of your fabric scraps and voila! Your lunch never looked more stylish!

​Sometimes a fabric order doesn't come out looking exactly the way we think it should because of print errors or flaws in the fabric. When we see these sorts of issues, we send the piece back for reprint and add the flawed piece to our scrap pile. Every so often, we fill the back of a semi-trailer with fabric, and send it off to a fabric recycler who shreds the yardage into tiny, unrecognizable bits. These bits then get used for industrial applications like car and furniture stuffing, bedding, and flooring.

While in the fabric truck, we find ourselves asking, “are we in fabric heaven?”

Whether we’re tending to the employee garden, composting lunch leftovers, sewing up blankets for a local charity, or finding creative ways to recycle our fabric scraps, the team at Spoonflower is certainly putting the art in earth!