When I sat down to calculate my wallpaper sales numbers at the beginning of this year, I had no idea what I’d find. I was shocked to see that wallpaper has quickly become one of my best-selling products without any extra work on my end. Like most pattern designers I know, I’ve always designed with fabric in mind. My scale, my detail level, and my collections were all planned for quilts and sewing projects, and wallpaper was an afterthought. If that sounds familiar, this post is for you.
In this post I’m sharing my wallpaper sales numbers and how to repurpose the patterns you probably already have sitting on your iPad.
wallpaper snuck up on me
I have been selling patterns on Spoonflower since 2015, and for most of that time, wallpaper was barely pocket change. My wallpaper designs earned $120 in 2016. In 2018 they still hadn’t passed $1,000 for the year. Fabric was doing all the heavy lifting (this was the minimalist era, when every wall was painted beige and pattern felt “too busy”).
Then the trends changed. Over the last decade or so, interior design has shifted away from minimalism and toward maximalism, and pattern is back on the walls. My wallpaper income climbed from $2.1K in 2020 to $6.5K in 2022 to $10K in 2023. For the last three years, wallpaper has made up roughly half of my Spoonflower income, and all of that growth happened in a shop I stopped adding new designs to back in 2018.
Here is a look at the percentage of fabric versus wallpaper sales in my Spoonflower shop over the years. One more thing to know about these numbers: I have never designed a single pattern specifically for wallpaper. Every wallpaper sale came from a design I originally created for fabric. Imagine what those numbers could look like if I sat down and designed for walls on purpose.
order value math
This is the point I really want to drive home, because it changed how I think about my own strategy.
When someone buys your fabric, they usually need a yard or two for a project. When someone buys your wallpaper, they’re covering a wall, sometimes a whole room, in a material that costs more per unit to begin with. They need large volumes to finish the job, and they’re investing in how their home looks for years.
Across 11 years of my Spoonflower sales (2015 through 2025), the average wallpaper order is worth more than double the average fabric order. The art is the same. The product is what changes the math.
why wallpaper sells more now
Maximalism and pattern drenching are taking over interior design. People aren’t just putting patterns on an accent wall anymore. They’re covering entire rooms, and some are even papering ceilings. Businesses have caught on too, because a bold patterned wall gets customers taking photos and posting them (free marketing that a boring white wall will never earn).
There’s also a market-size difference that most fabric designers never think about. Fabric is mostly bought by people who sew, and sewing as a hobby is far more common in the U.S. than in most of the world. Wallpaper can be bought by anyone with a wall and a vision, anywhere. No craft skills required.
Fabric sells to a niche. Wallpaper sells to everyone.
Here is the exact dollar amount that I made from wallpaper over the last 10 years. Within this time period, I never even designed specifically for wallpaper!
you already have the art
Those numbers prove that you don’t need to start from scratch with new wallpaper-focused patterns. Most of my wallpaper catalog is repurposed fabric art. That said, not every fabric design translates, and a few tweaks make a big difference:
- Go bigger on scale. Fabric motifs often run small because people are making quilts and garments that require small scales. On a wall, buyers are happy to go bold. A pattern scaled for a quilt square can disappear on a wall.
- Skip the fine detail. Wallpaper needs to make a statement from across the room, and textured materials like grasscloth will eat your fine lines anyway. Big and bold beats intricate.
- Rethink your simplest prints. I don’t upload my stripes, dots, or blender prints for wallpaper. Those categories are so oversaturated that getting found is nearly impossible. Save your upload time for the designs with personality.
Tip: When I set the scale on a wallpaper pattern, I get out an actual ruler (a real one, in my hands) and zoom my screen until the motifs match true size. It’s low-tech and it works.
no collections required
If you’ve been designing fabric collections, you know the juggling act: every pattern has to coordinate with the others because they might end up in the same quilt.
It’s like trying to give birth to a group of siblings that all get along perfectly. At some point, they are bound to clash.
Wallpaper patterns are almost always used alone, which means every design can be a hero. No blenders required, no color-matching across eight coordinates, no collection math. For a lot of pattern designers, that’s actually LESS work per sellable design than what you’re doing now.
my gated pod experiment
Once I saw what wallpaper was doing on Spoonflower, I tested the same designs somewhere new. In July 2025 I started uploading my top-selling fabric patterns to a gated print on demand wallpaper sites (I share my whole strategy for Gated POD here).
My first monthly payout was about $61. Twelve months later, the monthly payout was $503. That’s roughly $1,900 in the first year from art I had already made, on a shop that grows a little every month. I didn’t draw a single new design to make that happen. That is the power of repurposing!
the exact companies to use
If you’ve been making patterns only for fabric, this is your nudge to look at your gallery differently. My new class inside The Studio, Designing & Selling Wallpaper, walks through everything I’ve learned: where to sell (from hands-off print on demand to licensing pitches), a guide with direct links and pitch contacts for top wallpaper companies, how to set your scale and specs, and a design challenge to get your first wallpaper patterns out the door.
It's wallpaper time y'all!
- I share all the wallpaper companies I love and all the strategies you need to start selling existing or new patterns on wallpaper.
- Grab a list of companies to upload or pitch to so you don’t have to do any guessing.
