Spoonflower offers the largest design library for wallpaper and textiles, so it’s important to put time and thought into creating and promoting your work. If you are selling your designs at Spoonflower, you may be curious as to how we choose which artists to feature in our emails, social media, and other marketing efforts. In general, these selections are driven by trends, themes and other market factors. While there is no exact criteria or application process to be considered for these types of features, check out the tips in this article to help increase the likelihood that you’ll be discovered by Spoonflower customers and get noticed and featured by the Spoonflower marketing team!
Artwork, Collections, and Curation
Your Shop Profile
Participating in Design Challenges
Marketing Your Work on Social Media
Artwork, Collections, and Curation
- Remain active on Spoonflower and create new work often - but make sure it’s your best work. Spending more time creating quality artwork is more effective than simply creating as many designs as possible.
- Design thoughtful collections. Think about how one design could lead to a full body of work. Customers love to be able to mix and match options from a single collection for their quilts, rooms, and other projects. Our marketing team often features options in a collection-based format as well. Be sure your collections look stylistically cohesive and use coordinating colors but vary the design motifs and scales to create an interesting array of options for a customer. Learn more in Collections for Artists and 5 Reasons Why You Should be Designing in Collections.
- Be intentional when creating designs in multiple colorways. It’s a great idea to give shoppers several options but stick to your aesthetic. You don't need to necessarily overwhelm them with every color combination imaginable.
- Put yourself in a customer’s shoes when tagging your designs. Think about what customers might search for - seasonal themes, color palettes, or niche interests, and tag your designs with those terms. Learn more about tagging in Preparing Designs to Sell.
- Continuously curate your shop. Trends come and go, and that’s ok! If you have older work that is no longer on trend and has never sold, it may be time to consider removing it from sale.
Your Shop Profile
Customers love Spoonflower because they can support the work of independent artists, so make sure your shop is a reflection of you as an artist.
- Both customers and our marketing team are interested in the story behind your work and your artistic style. Tell the community a little bit about yourself in your shop bio!
- Put a face to your business and include a brightly-lit headshot as your shop image.
Participating in Design Challenges
Artists of all experience levels use the Spoonflower Design Challenges to introduce their work to a broad reach of potential customers and community members.
- Top finishers are often featured throughout the website, appear in curated collections, and earn exposure from several outlets, including email.
- An “Award Winner” badge is also added to the top 100 designs from each challenge and shoppers can choose to filter results by award winners only.
- Voters have the choice to add the Design Challenge entries to their favorites while voting. Many customers do this so they can easily collect options for their future purchases and projects.
- Many successful artists are able to lean into their own design style while still meeting the challenge requirements, which helps to retain a cohesive look in their shop. Enter challenges that you can align with your style, and skip challenges that are just not a good fit for the type of artwork you create.
- Learn more about Entering a Design Challenge or check out our Current Challenge Themes.
Marketing Your Work on Social Media
Your actions on Spoonflower.com are important, but many successful artists also remain active on one or more social media platforms and continuously market their artwork to the public. Driving external traffic to your Spoonflower shop can help boost your visibility internally too.
- Sharing your artwork on social media can be done in a variety of formats – whether it be your final finished design, a timelapse of your process, or mock-ups of your art on Spoonflower products. You can access and re-share mockups of your artwork on all the products offered on our site, but many successful artists will go a step further and create their own unique mockups or marketing images of products with their designs. Putting effort into interesting visual content goes a long way! You can learn more ways to showcase your fabric and wallpaper designs on our blog.
- Be sure to include detailed descriptions and engaging captions in your posts to help tell the full story of your work.
- Tag your posts with #Spoonflower to increase your chances of getting noticed by both our marketing team and the Spoonflower community.
- Be sure to include your Spoonflower shop link in your social media bio to drive traffic to your shop!