If you’ve ever uploaded the pattern you’re proudest of and watched it sit there while something you made in an afternoon keeps selling, you’re not alone. My single biggest seller on Spoonflower is a burlap texture. Not a detailed floral, not a pattern I spent days on.
After ten years of selling patterns, I went back through my sales to see which designs actually earn regular income, and the winners fall into a handful of categories. In this post I’m sharing my top sellers, the type of design each one represents, and what learnings you can take away from each one. Let’s dive in.
not fancy, but searchable
My Burlap Texture design is a plain woven texture. No drawings, no story, no layers of sketches. It didn’t take long to make, and it outsells everything else in my Spoonflower shop by a wide margin.
Here’s the truth: it sells because people search for it. An interior designer who needs a neutral wallpaper types “burlap” into the search bar, and there it is. One design studio even orders it again and again.
This design keeps selling for the same reason people buy plain white plates more than hand-painted serving platters. Everyone needs filler colors and textures in their homes.
Tip:
Make a few useful, simple designs (textures, blenders, neutrals) and title them with the exact word a buyer would type. Search interior design websites for phrasing so you’re using the right language.
built on a trend
Asian Crane Pond is my top seller on wallpaper, and it’s not a close contest.
I built it, and the collection around it, on the Art Nouveau and Craftsman trends. The whole collection has done well, not just this one design. The other designs inside the collection fill most of the other top spots in my wallpaper shops.
Almost all of Crane Pond’s sales come from one colorway (Blue and Red and Cream shown here), but the other colorways sell too. If something’s selling well, it’s worth putting in multiple colorways.
Takeaway: When you design around a trend, build a collection instead of a single pattern. The trend gives buyers a reason to look for the style right now, and the collection gives them more than one piece to choose from. Once you know what is working well from the collection, turn those patterns into colorways.
the STEM winners
Some of my steadiest Spoonflower sellers are Circuit Board, math notes, and F-18 Blueprints. Add Da Vinci’s Sketchbook, physics equations, and railroad symbols, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math, plus trades and academic subjects) become the biggest group of designs in my shop.
These are hot topics that almost nobody makes art for. The person buying math notes fabric is searching for something very specific for an accountant or a student who loves math.
Look at the jobs, hobbies, and subjects people are proud of, and ask whether you could draw something for them (if you have an engineer, accountant, or other STEM topic lover in your family, you already have a focus group to learn from).
beyond the flower
I love drawing flowers (I literally designed a whole business to allow me to do it all day). But generic florals barely show up in my Spoonflower sales. There are thousands of them, and “floral pattern” is a very crowded search.
This Osmanthus Flower and my Tea Flower top sellers are different. They’re specific plants with specific names, and they’re two of my top sellers, right behind Crane Pond.
I’m not saying you should stop drawing flowers. I’m just saying you should go further than “flower.” Name the exact plant, where it grows, or what it’s used for, and put those words in your title and tags. Someone searching “osmanthus wallpaper” has far fewer options than someone searching “floral,” and your design can be one of them.
Someone might even search something like “Japanese flower” and land on my design instead of someone who used a generic flower tag.
follow the customers
Doggy Paws isn’t a design I would have created for myself. Customers kept asking for it, so I made it. Once I finally broke down and made it, it became one of my best sellers. This is a good design to remind us that it’s not all about us. If we want to make money from our art, sometimes we have to make what customers or clients are asking for. While it may not be our favorite thing in the world to do, it’s the thing that enables us to make the work we love.
Takeaway: Don’t ask yourself if you have to sell out to sell your work. Ask yourself, “How many designs would you be willing to make purely for customers so that you can make the work that you truly love.”
Tip:
Keep a running list of what people ask you for in comments, emails, and messages. Don’t make every single thing that people ask for, but if you get the same request over and over, that is a sign!
made for the wall
This one is about size more than subject. Wallpaper has grown from almost nothing in my Spoonflower shop to one of my biggest categories, and a wallpaper roll pays me far more than a yard of fabric. My single biggest wallpaper sale was an Earthy Terracotta Sage Vine “Mural”. It’s a seamless pattern, but I put Mural in the title, and it sells a lot more than my other patterns like it.
Design your patterns to look good at wall size, and turn on wallpaper for every design that can handle it. This is where vectors help. A vector pattern scales up without getting blurry, and recoloring it for a new colorway takes minutes (I do all of this in Affinity Designer, which is free and I show how here.)
one pattern, many shops
Print-on-demand works best when you have multiple shops and multiple income streams, but of course, everyone starts out at square one. I spent years testing my designs on Spoonflower so that I knew what would be successful when I moved it over to other shops. Now I can confidently put my work on other sites and understand what will sell, but I had to go through that testing phase on Spoonflower first to get there.
Takeaway: start by focusing on one platform so you fully understand what works there before trying to start another one.
Take the Next Step
If you have a folder of finished patterns that only live in one place (or nowhere yet), my Share Your Stuff guide will help you get your patterns into the world and found by customers.
