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||Watercolor Sailboats Vector Pattern P953

Let’s Be Partners

Did you recently invest in a digital printer? Do you have a super cool new product but don’t have a design staff? Do you see print-on-demand as a forward-thinking and sustainable way of doing business in the future? If you answered yes to any of these questions, we would love to talk to you about becoming partners.   

We launched Design Pool in part because we were inspired by how print-on-demand technology was expanding exponentially. As new printers came into the market, more and more products suddenly had the capability of being produced on-demand. Instead of producing a product in 5 different options and crossing your fingers that your customers will like and buy them, you can now offer your customers lots of options and colors to choose from and then make that item. No more holding a large amount of inventory of designs you hope will sell, instead, you’re producing items that have sold.  

Patterns left to right: P1201, P947, P953

If you don’t have the resource to invest in your own design staff, partnering with Design Pool instantly gives you access to a digital library with over 300 designs. Sounds great, right? But how exactly does it work? 

We’ve broken it down into six easy steps.  

Step One: We talk.  
We strongly believe that a partnership should be beneficial to both parties and is built on a strong understanding of each other’s business, and open communication. We like to begin by talking to make sure we understand each other’s goals, as well as the logistics of what it means to license a design and pay royalties.   

Step Two: We commit. 
Next, we sign a contract. We believe a good contract protects both parties and should be easy enough for normal humans to read without the document being translated by a lawyer. (Although we also totally understand that you may want a lawyer to look it over.)  

Step Three: We get you on the website.  
We’ll get you up on the partners’ page of our website with any contact info you’d like to include so that people can get in touch with you directly to order your product. You will receive a unique login for our website so you can download designs when you need to. If you would like to embed all or some of our designs onto your website, we can do that.   

Step Four: Someone picks a design.  
There are a few different ways for a customer can pick a design depending on how your business functions. Perhaps one of your salespeople is showing the library to customers, or our designs are embedded onto your site for customers to choose from. It’s also possible that an interior designer found a pattern on our site and then goes to you for production. We can decide together what the best way is for your business.   

Step Five: You get to work.  
An employee from your team logs in to our site and downloads a design. Each design is already in a seamless repeat and comes in a vector file format. This design can be scaled easily to fit your specific dimensions. Need help? Our team is happy to help tweak the design to the exact size and specs that you need. We can even do a special color if none of the five colors included is exactly right. (We do charge an hourly rate for special custom work, but we’d be sure to let you know why and how much.)  You manufacture the item and ship it to the happy customer.  

Step Six: We settle up  
You pay us the agreed-upon royalty that is in that easy contract we both signed. If the customer comes back, again and again, to buy more of your product in this Design Pool design, great! It’s a win-win for both of us. If it turns out to be a one-time order, that’s fine too.   

At Design Pool, our philosophy is that is we want our partnerships to be meaningful and profitable for both of us. To make that happen, we always write a blog post about our newest partners and blast about new partners in our monthly trend letter. We also tag you in social media posts and give you some social love too. We can even provide you with marketing materials for your sales team.  

Have questions or want to get started? Give us a call or shoot us an email and we can get started on Step One to see if a partnership is right for both of us.

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Author

Kristin Crane

Kristin Crane has designed jacquard designs for the home furnishing and residential jobber market for many years, with mills in the US and in China. Today, she writes about pattern and design trends for Design Pool from her home in Providence, Rhode Island. When not writing about fabric, she can be found weaving in her home studio or hiking along the Rhode Island coast.

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