New Collection // Maxomorra // Fall & Winter '17

Founded in 2008, Maxomorra is a children’s clothing brand from Sweden. Their clothes are characterized by functional design with playful colors and patterns, produced using ecologically and socially responsible textile processes.

The new Autumn Winter ’17 Plus Collection is a new design project, risen from their curiosity to explore Maxomorra outside the box. The new Plus collection contains eight prints in a limited selection of styles, all made by Little Smilemakers Studio. With a few extra details to the prints and a brand new and beautiful color palette. To create complete outfits, there is also a small basic collection with solid colored jersey and velour available. As always, pick your favorites, mix and match, and go out and be fabulous. There are t-shirts, leggings, hats and so much more to choose from. But have some patience, the collection will be released for autumn and isn’t in shops just yet.

Conscious
The Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) was developed through a collaboration by leading standard setters with the aim of defining requirements that are recognized worldwide and that ensure the organic status of textiles from harvesting raw materials through environmentally and socially responsible manufacturing all the way to labelling in order to provide credible assurance to the consumer.
Maxomorra has been using GOTS certified cotton since 2008 and is a GOTS certified brand since 2011. So if you are looking for some new conscious baby and kids items to fill your shop with contact Maxomorra and ask for their new Autumn Winter Plus collection. Here are three of the designs that will be available next fall.

Top 5 fabric trends // winter 16/17 // watch out for these cool themes and styles this winter

Every season we reveal our best selling designs and make a fun top 5 of current trends. In this part of the world we are preparing for the colder season and all winter themes are picked up. But down under things are getting warmer, so we always have to contrasting geographical areas fighting for the hot sellers title. So much fun to see those two world join in our shop sales. Here is our Top 5 in fabric trends for this year’s winter season. All fabrics are listed below.

Monochromes & Textures
More and more people begin to realize we need a serene and peaceful place to call home after being overly exposed to so many things each and every day this seems to be a ultimate lifestyle change all around the world. As a designer the prints I love most are the basic, plain, pure shapes. We have been making fabric and print designs for over 8 years now and we have seen the shift from crazy colorful-all-colors-of-the-rainbow-in-one to the pure Scandinavian inspired texture like designs. And we love it. In this time and age our fabric buyers are more conscious and fabric should fit into a multi purpose: gender neutral, age neutral, cross seasonal etc. We love this strong trend since we love working with a clean simple shape and turn it into a strong repeat for fashion and home decoration. Especially the monochromes have been very popular this season. In strong black and white, less saturated natural colors and soft pastels.

Kawaii faces
When we visit japan almost two years ago we were inspired to make a new series of Kawaii style designs. We all know Hello Kitty right? Kawaii means something adorable or cute in Japanese and while I was traveling through this amazing one-of-a-kind quirky country I notice nearly everything ‘graphic design’ related, business logo’s, packaging, public adds, infographics: everything was Kawaii. Cute tiny eyes and a smiley face. So we are so happy to see these eyelashes, tiny faces and smiles pop up in home decoration in this part of the world. Our most popular Kawaii inspired print must be our popsicles and ice-cream design. But we also created some winter themes for this colder season. We mixed it up with a little Scandinavian: less colors. Hopefully we can enjoy those smiley faces for another few years.



Bears & Sloths
We looooove all the typical fall and winter animals. Animals will always be one of the most hot-selling themes and every year there is another animal standing out and trending like no other. This winter it has been the grizzly & polar bear. Bears are popping up everywhere and unfortunately a lot of copies are also going around also. But we have a cool, very unique selection in our shop. When we are preparing for snow, down under they are sewing their new summer pieces. This summer we saw our Sloths picked up all around the world. Now 8 months after releasing the Pura Vida series in our exclusive design presentation every single print artist has their own sloth available. So the sloths probably won’t be here next year but we wanted to celebrate them a little anyway. Next to elephants my personal fav-of-all-time animal. How can you NOT love those quirky creatures?



Gender Neutral Kids Themes
The past few years there has been a worldwide discussion about gender. This topic made it a little difficult to sell my pink designs as ‘girls print’ and blue designs as ‘boy print. Sometimes we get the most nasty comments on designs in blue or pink. The thing is: if someone is looking for ‘baby boy fabric’ you kinda need to tag designs in a way everyone can find what they need. It does not mean we think blue should only fit boys. As a Dutch designer I can tell you I am quite happy about the gender discussion and when people get better informed they also make better choices so that is why we see an increase in sales in kids designs that are gender neutral. It is getting more and more important to NOT label and we are so happy to see how strongly this effects our sales. That is why we wanted to add it to our top 5 trends this winter. Buying gender neutral is not only a gender conscious decision, it also reduces the footprint for our kids fashion industry and home decoration companies. Why release two lines when you can cover all at once? I love it! We plan on making more and more neutral prints ourselves but keep adding a boy and girl tag every now and then.

Dreams
All night and sky related designs are crazy popular this year. It is so funny to see how all dream themes and sky related prints are trending. Our hot air balloon designs were all sold with an exclusive license this year, we did not manage to add new designs to our fabric shop but our oldies, clouds, moon & stars, they are all picked up and are popping up in small boutiques all around the world. So funny how quick a trend can set! We thought this dream topic was a good one to end this post with. If you are looking for some fresh themes go visit our Spoonflower shop and show us what you make!

Limited Edition Memphis Style Little Smilemakers fabric // available via Ansje Handmade

We have something really cool to share with you guys! The past months we have been testing the market for fabric production ourselves. We worked with suppliers in the past but never produced our own series up until this summer when we decided to test these grounds.And we have something cool to show!

We have been approached by numerous companies in the past who wanted to order fabric outside of Spoonflower. Up until now we never provided this service but we would love to see if this would be a possibility in the future. Hopefully we can start doing so in the near future but as you can imagine, we want to make sure to cover all glitches and we want a top notch quality, with a low impact on our environment. Aiming for a high end product. Safe for babies and toddlers and with a long lasting print. of course all GOTS certified meeting the highest standards in the industry.

Ansje Handmade collaboration
When the designer herself starts her own production you can make sure things better get close to perfect so for our own production we are definitely not ready yet but we have started a test production and we now have released a limited edition range of Little Smilemakers fabric working together with Anouck who runs her small fabric business Ansje Handmade. Without her things wouldn’t have come this far, she has been a vital partner in starting this process and with a whole bunch of positive energy she has supported me and together we hope to get things up and running within the next year.

Fresh Limited Edition fabric
For the first small batch we have selected 9 different colorful prints to choose from. Some fresh Memphis Style inspired abstract rain drops an brush strokes. Our all time fave geometric plus sign design and some fun kids themes of course. All designs are printed on 220grams GOTS certified jersey fabric. And there is only 15 meters of each of these designs. So for all Little Smilemakers fans in the Netherlands, rush to Anouck’s online shop to get your hands on a piece of this fresh fabric. And stay tuned for more fabric production news!

Finished product // Bebè Casa new fabric collection

The past few months we have been working on a series of cool trendy new prints for Bebè Casa Fabrics. We have been working for this Polish company for over two years now and we love seeing their collection grow.

Always on trend with new pastels, gender neutrals and watercolor themes that are now available. Fun fresh and colorful fabrics suitable for your little ones wardrobe, create some cute dresses with those unicorns or fun home accessories or bedding for your kids bedroom or nursery. We licensed colorful mountains, vintage toys, retro owls, new feathers and sweet kawaii sky designs to Bebè Casa that are not for sale anywhere else.

Bebè Casa uses certified cotton and inks and the colors are vivid. If you are looking for some good quality cottons look no further. They have released their super fun collection of kids prints the past few weeks and they are now also available in their online shop or for all Dutchies: check out Ansje handmade, we manage to have some fabrics for sale in The Netherlands! Yay! Of course we are curious what beautiful creations will pop up from this new collection of designs. Don’t forget to share your finished results and tag @littlesmilemakers via Instagram.

Spoonflower talk // frequently asked questions about designs, scales and fabric

We have been working for Spoonflower for over 4 years now and we expanded our online fabric on demand shop to 2000+ designs. Each month we upload new designs and color schemes and as our fabric shop grows so does Spoonflower.

But over the course of 4 years a lot more has happened. Spoonflower started producing in Germany now and they have improved their quality over time. The fabrics, the prints, the colors. We are very excited to see how Spoonflower has matured with us. We are very happy to get the opportunity to sell our designs on demand through such a wonderful company.

Every single working day we start with thanking each and very one of our customers for their purchase, we answer their questions and help them further. We noticed a lot of our Spoonflower customers have some questions in common. And since a lot has happened within the company we will explain a few things in this post. Hopefully we can clarify some things and make your future purchase at Spoonflower a great experience. These are a few of our customers most frequently asked questions and comments.

Can I use Little Smilemakers fabric for commercial products?
Sure you can! We started working with Spoonflower because we wanted to fill in the gap, there was not a whole lot to choose from in fabric and wallpaper designs, a lot has changed since then. Every possible theme is represented and there are thousands and thousands of designs to choose from made by talented artist all over the world. We always try to stay ahead of the trend and love to see how our fabric is used in new collections every season. One question we keep getting is: "Can we use Little Smilemakers fabric for our business?" Spoonflower has a royalty based pay out towards designers, with each little piece of fabric that gets sold the designers benefit directly. We love to see people use Spoonflower fabric for their small businesses. We allow commercial usage and love to see all these incredible products made by our customers. Just make sure to tag us in your Etsy shop, Instagram and on your Facebook Pages.

What fabric should I choose for my project?
Spoonflower offers a wide range of fabrics. There are some eco friendly ones for conscious peeps. There are stretchy fabrics, different weights. So much to choose from! Most of our designs are most vibrant on Modern jersey. It is also our best selling fabric type. Lot's of leggings, t-shirts, rompers and other kids and baby products are made with the Modern jersey. If you are looking for a stretchy comfy and soft fabric for clothes this is a great option. This fabric would be similar to the EU tricot.

The plain cottons are a little more raw. They are less soft compared to the jersey/tricot and the designs printed on rawer materials are a little less vibrant in color. If you'd like to use a cotton or a heavier textile like canvas it is useful to know larger scaled prints look better than small scaled ones. On these raw materials there is a little more loss in detail. Same goes for the minky. Keep in mind this fabric is very fuzzy and details might not look as sharp as you've imagined after checking the design on screen. The minky is a great fabric for blankets and soft home textiles, canvas and heavy cotton are great for projects that need a heavier fabric such as bags, soft sole shoes. Silk is wonderful for a scarf of blouse. Whatever you want to create, every design can be used on different fabric. I always recommend ordering a sample swatch. Spoonflower also has a little swatch book with all available fabric. Might be handy if you are a serious sewer.

Can I get this design in a larger scale?
Some of our designs have different scales. We tend to upload different scales once designs get popular or sometimes even become hot sellers. But if you need another scale of any other designs we have up in our shop you can send us a message and we will be happy to scale a design, make them smaller, or larger, whatever you need. We can also rotate the design. In most cases new scales are available in the shop within 24 hours so just send us your requests, we are happy to help!

Can I get a discount?
Of course everyone want to pay less. Spoonflower is not the cheapest website to purchase fabric from but it is an honest one. Every sale benefits the artist so keep in mind while we make your small business possible, we artists also need to eat. You might be able to find cheaper fabric somewhere but you will never find as many talented designers and such a great and gorgeous range of designs anywhere else. For small business owners Spoonflower now offers bulk discount and you can also update your account to Spoonflower Pro. Pro is a premium service for small business owners, frequent orderers, and anyone else who loves Spoonflower. For more information check out the Spoonflower website.



How to avoid import tax?
Spoonflower is based in the US but as of April this year they also opened up a factory in Berlin, germany. Good news for our European customers. They are still in the process of making this a smooth process though, they just started! If you'd like to stay away from import tax you might want to check your countries custom rates. The weight, the size of the package, it differs from country to country. But if you are based in a EU country, things got a whole lot cheaper as of this month.

I love your designs but don't like Spoonflowers quality.
As I mentioned before, some designs print, and look, better on some certain fabrics. Spoonflower prints with a water based paint which is better for our environment, it also means the print might not be as rich as you'd like. Have you ordered an organic cotton and are you not happy about the quality? Know that raw materials like the organic fabrics are less smooth, a print on this surface will loose some detail and will fade a little sooner than when printed on other fabric types like the Cotton Knit, Satin and Modern Jersey. Their thread is more smooth so easier to print detailing, smaller scales and it also has more color dept. If you do want to stick with the organic range try putting the fabric in vinegar to fixate the colors before washing. An old granny trick but it helps! Wanna have a bright, high quality fabric without color fading for fashion and home textiles? Use the Modern Jersey or Cotton Knit.

Can you check when my order will be shipped?
We frequently get questions like these. Spoonflower produces in Germany and in the US. All designs that are up for sale are made by artists that are based all over the world. Designers don't take part in the production process. All order related questions can be send to Spoonflower directly. So if you have questions about the fabrics, shipping, costs etc. just send a message to help@spoonflower.com. If you have any design related questions you can ask your designer through their Spoonflower profile page.

How can I upload my finished project image?
Looking at all these finished projects makes us so happy! But uploading a finished project image is a little difficult. Spoonflower does not allow an image to be uploaded directly to our design page. Instead it has to be uploaded to Flickr, or on a blog or other webpage first. You can copy and paste the URL link to the Spoonflower design page and select the right image. They have a really good word for this in Dutch, the English language really need: omslachtig. If you keep having trouble uploading, just send us an email with your images and we will upload them into our profile.

Well, I hope this will help some of you. If you have any further questions that are design & Spoonflower related. Just send us a message on our Spoonflower page. Have fun and keep posting your finished designs!