Why don't we sell digital downloads?

For those who aren’t overly familiar with the embroidery world, PDF downloads are a very common way for people to sell their designs. You pay a small sum and then you are automatically emailed a pdf which contains an outline of the design, colour codes for what threads to buy and some high level instructions of what to do. They generally geared towards your experienced stitcher who has a whole stash of materials or someone who wants to customise a design in their own colours or style. So we are often asked why we don’t do PDF downloads for our work given how popular these would be. For me it comes down to the fundamental question of artistic integrity.

When I create our designs, I view each one as a piece of art. Much like an artist might make prints of a particular painting in order to make each single finished artwork accessible to a wider audience, I make kits. Each kit is effectively part of a design edition, all centered around the original design.

So just as an artist would take immense care over ensuring the print had an accurate representation of the colours in the original design, has the quality and details to reflect the artistic style, my kits have the same faithful representation of the original. In the same way they wouldn’t just send you a picture of their artwork to print out in your home printer, I won’t do that with my embroidery. That means for your stitching to be a faithful representation of the original, the fabric and threads must be the same. The moment those are changed, it is fundamentally different piece of art - it mimics the design but is not true to it. If I felt a design should have been stitched on red rather than blue, I would have designed it as such. But I didn’t – and that’s my prerogative as the artist. And I don’t mean to sound overly intense, but I am very proud of my work and view it as seriously as an artist would. Just because it’s kits, doesn’t mean its lesser.

More than my own artistic integrity though, I have to think about how the sale of pdfs could reflect on our business and also on the experience you receive.

Firstly, if someone takes the pdfs of the design and then creates the design in a way that I don’t think reflects the original intention of the design (maybe it’s stitched in a different way, uses entirely different colours, is put into a finished product that is different than I intended), whilst I completely respect that we all have different taste, if what is made isn’t to my taste but then featured or shared with others as a “Fabled Thread” design, then I worry about how that reflects on the business. It could present an aesthetic that I don’t believe is aligned with what we do.

Second to that, I believe we have a responsibility as a business to teach - first and foremost we are an experience business - so how does a PDF download make someone feel. It’s hardly great fun to receive, it could make you feel incredibly intimidated and how does that build any relationship between us. It’s too transactional - where is the heart?

Now I get the desire to add your own style, you own creative expression to pieces (I started a business because kits were too controlled for me - I get it!) - but I don’t believe the way to achieve creative expression is to give you free reign over my designs. I believe the way to do it is to teach you how to come up with your own designs and give you access to a curated range of materials from which I believe you can create great art. That’s why we run things like our Design Challenges, why we have a supplies shop stocked with all the fabrics and threads I use, why we sell frames in so many different shapes, why we have virtual courses. All of that is geared towards people who are inspired by The Fabled Thread, but want to do their own thing. This is our alternative to PDF downloads - one that encourages creativity whilst retaining our artistic integrity.