Spoonflower was founded in May 2008 by two Internet geeks, Gart Davis and Stephen Fraser, whose creative wives asked why there wasn’t anywhere to design custom fabric for their home décor. This was an interesting question to pose to Davis, who at the time was president of Lulu.com, one of the largest independent self-publishing platforms on the Internet. “If books, why not fabric?” was a reasonable question to ask! As a result, the first company of its kind, Spoonflower was launched in Durham, N.C., on that dream of empowering the individual to create on-demand, custom-designed textiles.

Ten years later, the Spoonflower community has grown to over 3.5 million individuals who use their own designs and its Marketplace to make curtains, quilts, clothes, bags, furniture, dolls, pillows, framed artwork, costumes, banners, and much, much more. With more than 500,000 designs (plus more added every day), the Spoonflower Marketplace is the largest collection of independent designers in the world. Customers can order fabrics to cut-and-sew themselves or use Spoonflower’s websites Roostery and Sprout Patterns to receive finished goods. The company has production facilities in Raleigh, N.C., and Berlin, Germany, and approximately 150 employees.

Kerry King, Spoonflower’s Vice President of Research & Development, said, “We think of ourselves not only as a place that prints fabric, but as a company that cultivates a community of designers for whom we provide a platform to make their designs available to be printed on a variety of substrates.” King explained that while Spoonflower has always had a strong international customer base, primarily in English-speaking countries, the attraction of having an operation in Berlin was two-fold: “It allows us to serve our international customers better with shipping and delivery, plus we have a team in Berlin working on localization of our website. Berlin is our first venture into an international location, and we are learning a great deal. The objective is to replicate our capabilities in both locations, as well as others we might establish in the future.”