Profile: Spoonflower, Mebane, NC
Stephen & Kim Fraser are the owners of Spoonflower a new print-your-own fabric company that has taken the online craft world by storm. A couple of months ago, while they were still in their beta-mode, I had the opportunity to send some of my own designs to them to have printed. I was very pleased with the results and look forward to working with them again. As a product designer the myriad possibilities now open through their accessible site are exciting, what makes it even better is that they are based here in North Carolina – their headquarters are just down the street from Chapel Hill in Mebane.
Recently, I asked them a few questions about their business:
Can you tell us a little about yourselves, the company and how the idea for Spoonflower came about?
Spoonflower was my wife’s idea. 10 months ago I knew absolutely nothing about fabric or sewing. I was just another Internet marketing guy with a crafty wife. One night Kim asked me if I knew of a web site where she could print fabric to make curtains from her own design. It turned out there wasn’t a web site like that.
Now it just so happens that I used to be the marketing guy for another North Carolina startup called Lulu.com. Lulu uses digital manufacturing technology to offer print-on-demand books. Print on demand fabric seemed similar enough that I brought in a friend – my old boss from Lulu, Gart Davis – to help pull Spoonflower together as a business idea. A few months later we were up and running and the response has been overwhelming. The craft community is just amazing and we are lucky to have a business built around it.
Design by Shannon Benavidez
What does “Spoonflower” mean?
Spoonflower is the common name of an endangered plant native to North Carolina that grows around the edges of bogs. A couple of years ago Kim and I embarked on a project to build a rain garden in our backyard. ‘Rain garden’ sounds awfully romantic, but what it really is is a bog. In researching the names of bog plants for our garden, I ran across Spoonflower and liked it enough to buy the domain.
What are some of the creative projects that users have created from your fabrics to date?
The Spoonflower community amazes me every day with its creativity. People use the fabric to make clothes, quilts, bags, and other things that you might expect, but they also use it to make buttons, dolls, cloth-books, and all kinds of other things that we had not thought of before we started the business. The dolls are my favorites. There’s one guy in Wilmington, John Golden, who makes stuffed robot dolls. They’re great.
How can our readers get started creating their own fabric through your service?
The basic process is very straightforward. You create an account, upload a design to an online gallery, and order a piece of fabric. There’s no minimum. You can order just a swatch, or several yards. You can specify how you want the design to be repeated on the area of the fabric you order. The tricky bit, of course, is how to create the design in the first place. Many of the folks using Spoonflower create their designs using Photoshop or Illustrator, but some upload designs they put together using photos, or free online graphics programs like Picnik. One very talented designer, Rachel Galloway of Mamma Made Designs, put together a whole series of tutorials on creating Spoonflower designs using the open source program Inkscape, which is free.
Design by Shelley Lane Kommers
Can you tell us about your new headquarters in Mebane, NC?
Spoonflower is headquartered in a former sock mill in downtown Mebane, North Carolina. Kim and I live in Chapel Hill, and Gart and Anne live kind of between Chapel Hill and Hillsborough, but Mebane was appealing for a number of reasons. First and foremost, Mebane is surprisingly cool. In addition to the antique shops, it boasts a martini and tapas bar and a gourmet market. And now it has an Internet company as well, so it’s clearly up and coming. But Mebane is also geographically between the Triad and the Triangle, between a part of the state that used to rely on textiles to support its economy and a part of the state that is one of the leading areas in the country for technology. We think Spoonflower is aptly situated between those two cultures.
Why do you think North Carolina is a good environment for running your business?
The entrepreneurial community for technology companies in our area is small, but robust. Startups are common, but not common enough for everyone to be tired of them or cynical. I can’t imagine trying build a company like Spoonflower in Silicon Valley. It’s the difference between being a trout in a fast-running, clear creek and a catfish in a stock pond. We’ve also been able to rely a lot on some existing North Carolina textile expertise. There’s an organization called [TC]2 that serves the “soft goods” industry that has been crucially helpful to us. NC State and Cotton, Inc are two other local fonts of knowledge.
What plans do you have for Spoonflower in the future?
One big change we have planned includes transforming Spoonflower into a marketplace for textile designs where individuals can actually sell their own work. Another is simply making it easier to create original textile designs without having to know how to use Photoshop. A lot of our customers are in other countries, so internationalizing the site is also in the plans.
What are your favorite things about residing in NC? Can you list some of your favorite bands, restaurants and places?
Hmm. Favorite bands and restaurants require free time to go out, right? We don’t have much of that. But when we do go out, which is very seldom, Kim and I love Lantern, Crook’s Corner and the BBQ Joint in Chapel Hill. We rarely see music anymore, but still listen to Crooked Fingers, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Portastatic and the Mountain Goats. My favorite place to run is the William B. Umstead State Park in Raleigh. My favorite place to take the girls is Duke Gardens in Durham, where we like to catch tadpoles. Kim’s favorite shops are Thimble Pleasures and Mulberry Silks in Carrboro.
And finally, what advice can you give to other entrepreneurs trying to make their own creative ideas come to fruition?
When you have an idea for a business, try to understand as specifically as possible who it is you think will be a customer for that business. Find those customers and talk to them as early and often as possible. Figure out what they want and develop an unwavering focus on it. What you don’t do is at least as important as what you do, so focusing on a specific niche will help keep you from being distracted. And be prepared for everything to take longer and cost more than you think it will. But you probably knew that already.
looks like i need to take a trip to mebane.