Minimising Waste
I have seen thousands of unsold fabric artwork headers in textile studio archives, and artworks purchased gathering dust in boxes fashion companies. I have watched the latter being eventually sent to landfill, and realised many of them had not been used at all beyond the digital file. Subsequently, I made the decision not to print fabric headers and ship them across the globe for showings. Lovely People Studio is an online textile design studio, which allows my clients to view prints online, from anywhere in the world.
While fabric headers can sometimes be useful for colour matching, in my experience many fabric printers still have difficulty matching to them, and will request colour codes to match to. As many of my clients are also changing or tweaking colours to suit the rest of their collections, this alone brings the value of a fabric header into question. Because of this, colour matching for existing colourways is a complimentary service with the purchase of each print, reducing strike off waste. Headers are only printed on request, should the client require one.
All border prints are created with separated borders and a repeating main pattern tile. This allows you to modify the print layout to suit the cutting lay, maximise printed fabric usage, and minimise fabric waste. For some ideas on how you can do this, take a look at this post on insta.
Many of prints in the shop are two way or four way prints where at all possible, which enables pattern pieces to be placed in several directions, decreasing the fabric yield per garment, leading to less offcuts.
Reducing waste during development is beneficial for both brand profit and the planet, and ways to do this will be unique to each brand. This is considered during project development, and I am happy to consult with you on yield, ways to utilise offcuts, and how you can take steps towards circularity in considering the end life of products, post-consumer purchase.