Joining Patterned.com a Licensing Platform

I have been mostly focused on Spoonflower for my surface design career. I did dabble in Red Bubble and looked into many other options without any success. I have decided to give another option a try.

Patterned.com

Of course the first design I loaded and used as my shop banner was the Croissants! They are still available on Spoonflower in the Croissants Collection too.

Patterned.com is a licensing site that forbids the use of AI (big bonus!) and sells digital licenses for purchasers to use the design as they wish. You can set the prices, within a range, for each license type. There are licenses for personal use, commercial and exclusive.

What drew me in was the fact that purchasers would not need to pay shipping, which as someone living in New Zealand, an island at the bottom of the world, is a game changer. Shipping can be slow and extortionately expensive.

Patterned has a lovely look site which is nice and straight forward to navigate. You do not need to upload several different sizes of designs, just the largest, as purchasers will have your file that they can resize to suit themselves. You can also upload multiple colour ways as one design.

I feel like it is more aimed at business and brands than for personal use, which is great to be able to reach that market.

The tax forms are infinitely easier to fill out than the same forms on Spoonflower. It is all integrated into the website and you just need to follow the steps. Anyone (maybe just non-Americans?) on spoonflower has probably had hours of frustration and will appreciate that!

Currently I have 11 designs, most in multiple colours, loaded and am working on preparing many more. As the commercial designs need to be in PSD format with layers, I have been tiding up layers and labelling them clearly on these existing designs. For new designs I will make sure to do as I go!

Patterned offers free accounts and a pro artist accounts. For the moment, I am trialing using the free account but will consider the paid option in the future. The beautiful mock ups and collections you can create as a pro artist are very tempting!

Interested in joining Patterned.com too?

There are two ways to join Patterned as a designer. You can submit your portfolio to be accepted (which I did), or a current designer can send you an invite code.

There are some perks to sending invite codes, there are 'golden likes' and even an game on Apple Arcade. I have not quite worked out what all of that means...or how it works.

For now, I am excited to see how it goes. I will fill you in when I work it all out!