Should you sell your patterns on Etsy?

A deep dive into the pros and cons of selling repeating patters on Etsy

I’ve been asked this a few times recently and it is such a great question I wanted to explore it more detail as I have quite a lot to say on this topic!

As always this isn’t going to be a post telling you what you should or shouldn’t do in your business (only you can decide that!) but I will set out the pros and cons to selling seamless patterns on Etsy and at the end explain what I’ve decided for my own business and why.

It might surprise you to know that I’ve actually been selling on Etsy for 6 years now and have clocked up over 10,000 sales! (not seamless patterns though!)

You can take a look at my shop here: The Lettering Tree

Selling on Etsy was my first artistic venture after the birth of my third daughter in 2019. I sold hand lettered cards and prints and you can see some of my original cards below. I lettered them in Procreate and printed and packaged them at home.

Slowly over the years I moved to digital downloads and I found an underserved niche in Bible verse crafts for kids. I now sell only digital products in my shop. I don’t add new products very regularly at the moment so the shop runs on autopilot most of the time.

The last 6 years of selling on Etsy has given me a lot of insights and thoughts on this topic which I’m excited to share with you in this post so you can make an informed decision if it’s something you’ve been thinking about.

For the purposes of this post I will focus only on the pros and cons of selling repeating patterns rather than of selling on Etsy in general.

What is Etsy?

Etsy is an online marketplace focused on handmade, vintage, and digital downloads, including art and design products.

Anyone can set up a shop for free and sell products that fit into these categories. They could be physical products or digital files. When you sell a product you pay a fee to Etsy.

The Pros of selling seamless repeats on Etsy

Etsy is a great place to start when you are just setting up your business. There is a very low barrier of entry (no fee to set up a shop) and you can get selling straight away. You don’t need to jump through any hoops to be accepted as a seller.

Seamless patterns are in demand on Etsy! Just a quick search of ‘seamless patterns’ reveals that there are many shop owners selling patterns and many of the listings have a ‘bestseller’ badge on which means they are selling well.

It’s a great source of passive income. I’ve found this from selling my Bible resources. You do the work once, pop it up on Etsy and Etsy will take care of the rest, you don’t need to be hands on. (Every so often a customer needs some help, so it’s not totally hands off, but it doesn’t happen very often!)

Etsy is a great place for getting ‘found’ as an artist. A little while after I’d started selling my hand lettered cards on Etsy I was contacted by the creative director of a card company here in the UK that produced personalised print on demand cards. They asked me if I could create some for their website, which I did and I still receive a royalty from them every month all these years later. I can’t be 100% sure they found me on Etsy, but I think it is pretty likely as I didn't have a big presence elsewhere at the time. Being found on Etsy can lead to bigger opportunities.

The cons of selling seamless repeats on Etsy

When you sell a seamless repeat on Etsy you will lose control over it. As soon as someone else has the file you are no longer able to control what or where or when it is used. You are able to put a ‘license’ in the listing description stating what it can be used for, but while some people may adhere to this you can never be totally sure.

While this is similar to licensing your patterns to a company I think there is quite a big difference. When you license your pattern to a company or individual, usually you have a good idea of who they are, their company values and their products.

Although you can never be sure they won’t ‘steal’ your pattern, you can do your research and put a contract in place to protect your work. (I have said no to licensing requests before when I haven’t been 100% confident with the company or person who wanted to license my work)

On Etsy however, you are not able to research your buyers. There is nothing stopping someone from buying a pattern and putting it straight up on a POD site, or breaking the ‘rules’ you’ve set out in your listing description, or even just reselling it themselves! (I hate to be negative, but it does happen)

When you sell your patterns on Etsy you can never then license them ‘exclusively’ to anyone else as it is already out in the world.

If you have a strong artistic style, selling your patterns to anyone on Etsy may water down your brand. If the patterns are available to anyone and are easy to purchase you may miss out on bigger more exclusive licensing opportunities.

In the era of AI-generated art, where seamless patterns can be created in seconds, listing your handcrafted designs alongside mass-produced AI content may also dilute your brand.

You can’t sell your patterns for a very high price on Etsy. Due to high saturation and mass produced AI work you’re not going to be selling at such a high price as you would if you are licensing your work individually to a company. (However this may not matter if you struck the right niche and sold at high volume!)

My personal thoughts

I don’t think there is necessarily a right or a wrong to this question. It all depends on what you are aiming for in your art business.

Etsy can be a great place to make a passive income and if you are primarily looking for income streams, Etsy may be a good place for your to test the waters in selling repeating patterns. If you got the niche just right there would be a possibility of earning some good hands-off income from your work. (I love the passive income I get from Etsy!)

The only thing I would say is that with any new platform, if you're going to try it, you need to be 'all in' rather than just dipping your toe in the water and listing a couple of patterns. It's harder for new sellers to break in so you would need to stock your shop well from the outset if you wanted to give it a shot.

For me personally, I have decided not to sell my repeating patterns on Etsy. I am more keen to foster relationships with individual companies who would like to license my work. I would worry about losing control of my artwork if anyone could buy it from Etsy which may jeopardise bigger opportunities down the line.

I am also very open about my creation process which is totally my own designs created from scratch (No AI) and I wouldn’t want to put my hand crafted patterns up alongside a barage of AI work.

Lastly I would worry about people stealing the pattern and using it for purposes I hadn't allowed or reselling it on another platform.

What else can you sell on Etsy as a surface pattern designer?

Whether you decide to sell your repeating patterns on Etsy or not, there are plenty of other products to sell on Etsy as an artist. So if you're keen to try Etsy but unsure of selling your repeats there are some other options of digital products to sell:

Procreate brushes

Templates

Printables with your designs on (such as planners – these sell really well on Etsy!)

Digital paper packs. (These just need to be a pattern for people to print out, you don’t have to supply a repeat tile which takes away some of the ‘cons’ from above.)

Mockups (if you’re good at photography you could make a selection of mockups for other artists to put their patterns onto)

Clip art sets. (You could illustrate individual motifs and sell them as a clipart pack.)

I hope this post has given you some food for thought and helped you to make an informed decision about Etsy if you’ve been sitting on the fence about it.

I’d love to know your thoughts, particularly if you’ve had a similar or different experience to selling on Etsy – let’s keep the conversation going in the comments!