GORHAM, MAINE, USA
Immediately upon graduating from the University of Kansas with a BFA in graphic design, Erin Flett “U-Hauled it east” with two dogs, a cat, and her fiancé, Maslen, to Portland, Maine, where her parents had retired. Her first four years in Portland were spent working for an advertising agency, where she quickly advanced to the position of art director. In part “because nobody had any money to buy photos,” Erin says, she often added small hand-drawn embellishments to wedding invitations, catalogs, and brochures. Her drawings delighted her clients; these motifs were the beginning of Erin’s hand-drawn style.
When Erin was expecting her first child, she began building a successful business as a freelance graphic designer. Yet she longed to create her own designs and traveled to the Surface Design Show in New York to investigate selling her work. Through contacts she made there, she started producing designs for companies like Pottery Barn Teen. But the companies she was working with were asking for “supersafe” patterns. “That made me realize that no one was going to do my aesthetic,” she explains.
Erin designed her first pillow as a wedding present, but she didn’t know how to screen print. She took her design to a local T-shirt company: “As soon as they printed it, something happened. It was like a light bulb went off—it resonated instantly!...I could put my designs on fabric! It was so fast; it was instant gratification.” For the next year, Erin created designs that could be printed with small screens. She mixed her inks at home and brought the designs and fabric to the T-shirt shop. Finally, the owner said, “Erin, this is crazy! You need to learn how to print.”
Erin began printing with her husband, Maslen, in the basement of their home, when their daughters were two and five. To maximize their small space, Maslen, a carpenter, built racks that hoist printed fabric above the table to dry while Erin printed more pieces. To meet demand for the line of pillows in her Etsy shop, she hired her first employee, a printer who is still part of her team. After two years of working in her basement, Erin was featured in a full-page profile in O, The Oprah Magazine. The extraordinary publicity gave her the confidence to move her operation to a studio space on the fourth floor of a former cotton mill overlooking the Presumpscot River in Westbrook, Maine, where the business continued to expand for the next seven years. In 2019, Erin and her team moved to a new location that is four times the size of the previous studio. Located in a corner building in downtown Gorham, Maine, the new manufacturing space includes a showroom and retail space.
“Modern fabric design is an interpretation of one’s own life and experiences. Good design tells a story.”
Over the years, Erin’s offerings for wholesale and retail customers grew to include hundreds of hand-printed designs on a wide range of pillows and bags, hats, and goods for the table and kitchen, such as tea towels, napkins, and glassware. She has also introduced wallpaper and custom yardage options for trade and hospitality customers, and she recently finished designs for a three-hundred-room hotel in California. Her design and printing methods, however, have changed little. The majority of Erin’s products are still printed on cut fabric using small screens.
All orders are carefully organized to flow through the studio’s production line. The studio manager creates a detailed list for each order, which is sent to the cutters, who prepare pieces of cloth for specific products. The cuts are passed to the printers, who screen print each piece by hand following the image and color specifications on the print list. The prints are then hung to dry on laundry-style lines before being sent to the stitchers, who sew the finished products. “We are a made-to-order design studio. Our whole model is that we only print, sew, and make what is already sold. We don’t really have any inventory, and it works brilliantly because we don’t have to invest in what’s not selling...The team prints about 150 to 200 pieces a day.” Erin’s stitchers are all local women and men who work from home or in the studio.
Of her team, Erin says, “I’m surrounded by amazing people who really believe in our process and craft.”
Nearly all of Erin’s base cloths are woven in America. She works closely with cotton mills in North Carolina that produce cotton canvas and bark cloth, a tightly woven cotton fabric with a textured crepe weave. “I love the aesthetic of linen and our textured cottons...All of my cottons are woven in the United States. I get my linen from a mill in Belgium; they have a huge range of weights...The fabric has to have a special feeling to it; it has to have a soul.”
Erin’s deep involvement in every aspect of her business leaves limited time for creating designs. Twice a year, Erin immerses herself in drawing and designing. She usually starts out with an idea or an image and makes thousands of sketches, doodles, drawings, and paintings before selecting specific images that resonate with her. Sometimes she will use a piece of artwork as a whole design, but more often, she cuts up her drawings and collages them together. Erin calls on her graphic design skills to transform her initial hand drawings by copying, pasting, flipping, and repeating them on the computer.
I can be inspired by anything, whether I’m going for a walk with my kids or gardening; I take pictures all the time...Everything I see becomes a pattern. I was running with a friend and had to stop to take a picture of the way the light was going through the leaves; there was the most beautiful pattern on the ground...Artists and designers have brains that are naturally like a kind of sieve; all this information comes in, and we have this innate need to create pattern and design.
