spoonflower

Spoonflower, the online crafting marketplace and digital textiles printer based in North Carolina, has experienced massive growth since they began back in 2008 as a fabric-by-the-yard, print-on-demand e-commerce site. From the beginning, the beating heart of the brand has always been its community of independent artists and crafters. Spoonflower nurtures this community by providing a digital platform for indie artists to submit their own patterns and designs, which other crafters and makers then use to create their own products and build businesses from their homes.

As Spoonflower’s business grew, the company began to leverage its vast library of patterns and designs to enter the DTC home décor category. They tasked Britton Marketing & Design Group with answering a complex question that many growing brands face: can what is essentially a B2B brand live under the same umbrella as a B2C home goods brand?

To solve this challenge, we began by curating and synthesizing the data. This data included conducting new primary research studies (online audience surveys, internal team surveys, stakeholder interviews), analyzing secondary data (market forces, trends and opportunities, and directional audience insights), syndicated data (audience psychographics and category opportunity identification), as well as search and social listening data (topic volume, competitiveness, and sentiment analysis).

With a clear view of the audiences for the Spoonflower brand and their existing home décor DTC brand, as well as the category landscape, we applied our Brand Values ID Positioning process. This methodology is part of our work with the New American Middle, a consumer supergroup we have made it our mission to understand. One of the central takeaways from our work is that the New American Middle consumer makes purchasing decisions based on values more complex than status or a price tag. We helped Spoonflower identify those activating values within the category, as well as the values currently being expression by their competition.

Once we had determined which core New American Middle values Spoonflower should work to “own” within the category—family, sustainability, inclusivity, empowerment, transparency, and authenticity—we combined those values with directional audience segmentation and flexible consumer personas to develop messaging, channel prioritization, and an actionable editorial strategy. Our expertise in marketing within the home goods category helped us also to develop a fully fleshed-out strategy for reorienting the brand’s visuals and copy around these ownable values.

Every phase of our work pointed us toward a clear conclusion: the core values of Spoonflower, with some minor refinement, were deeply meaningful to the brand’s designer community, as well as its burgeoning home decor audience. This meant that the company could reach these audience groups through a single brand. We helped to reposition, refine, clarify, and evolve this brand with a thorough brand DNA and creative playbook to help guide Spoonflower as it began expressing these newly clarified values to its audiences.

In the end, what we delivered to Spoonflower was more than a research document, a series of presentations, or brand documents—it was a path toward bringing people together around a reinvigorated sense of purpose.

Images used w/ Spoonflower's permission:

Header image: @spoonflower
Flower pattern image: @oanabefort  
Water color image: @katiekortmanart
Fabric sample image: @walkpaperscissors
Sewing image: @hollydollydarling