How to Design Patterns that Knitters Actually Want to Make
As a knitting pattern designer, it can be difficult to balance your own creative ideas with what the knitting community will want to buy and make. You might know what you like to knit or design, but how do you know if there is an appetite for it?
In today’s blog post, we are going to be talking about validating your knitting pattern ideas. This isn’t compulsory, but it can really help you figure out whether a design is going to be a hit with your community.
I’m not designing patterns on a regular basis at the moment (my focus is on creating my sweater design course and extending my existing sizing at the moment), but I will definitely be doing more of this once I am. More than ever, I’m understanding that a successful knitting pattern design business isn’t based on serendipity but on strategic decisions based on actual data.
Validating pattern ideas isn’t an exact science - it will never guarantee massive success. However, it can help you to make better decisions on what designs you pursue, improve or even, scrap.
There are two ways that I suggest you use to validate your knitting pattern ideas: getting early-stage feedback from your community and observing what knitters are buying at the moment.
Get Design Feedback From Your Community
The best way to get early-stage feedback from your community is via social media. It is a quick and simple way to share your process, ask questions and see how your community responds.
I find Instagram to be a great platform for this kind of validation. Share photos of your sketches, swatches and WIPs on either Instagram Stories or on your feed and don’t be afraid to ask for feedback. By getting feedback at the early stages of the pattern design process, you are more likely to avoid pattern flops!
The bigger your community, the more feedback you might receive. That being said, some very small accounts have an extremely engaged community, so this kind of feedback process can be very valuable to many people!
If you get a strong positive reaction to your design, you can be sure that your community is excited by the direction it’s going. Conversely, you won’t likely get a strong negative reaction to your design - people want to be polite. Instead, you’ll get no reaction at all!
If you usually get good engagement on your Instagram photos and a photo of the early stages of your design gets no reaction despite asking for feedback, it might be a red flag that it doesn’t resonate with your community. In that case, you might want to consider making some changes to see if it better suits your community.
You could share multiple options - whether it’s sketches, swatches, colourways etc. - and ask your community to vote on their favourite. I’ve seen this done several times and it is such a wonderful way to involve your community in the design process. Makers love to influence the direction of a design!
An added bonus is that your community will feel more invested in your design, so they are more likely to purchase the pattern once it’s published. It will also build anticipation so that your community is ready to buy!
What are knitters buying?
Another great place to validate your pattern ideas is Ravelry because it is the main place that knitters are buying their patterns. Ravelry’s Hot Right Now page is one of my favourite places to research what patterns knitters are buying right now.
To get more useful data, I usually filter patterns by “purchase online” and “purchase in print” to avoid including free patterns in the mix. Since I want to sell knitting patterns, I want to see what patterns knitters love enough to spend money on. It can also be helpful to filter by the craft and category of the pattern you are designing, such as “knitting” and “sweater” or “hat”.
I also like to sort patterns via “most popular” and choose patterns published this year or the last couple of years. Remember to filter out the free patterns! This will give you a good overview of what’s trending.
You will probably spot trends amongst the popular patterns. If they align with the type of pattern you’re designing, it really helps to validate your idea.
For example, if I look at knitted sweaters that are hot right now, I see a lot of colourwork yokes, lace yokes, stranded colourwork in general, positive ease, t-shirts, bold stripes and vanilla raglans. If I was designing a lace yoke t-shirt, I could proceed with my idea in confidence because I know that there is a demand for the type of pattern I’m designing.
Edited to add: Funnily enough, a couple of days after I wrote this blog post, The Fibre Co. released Newlands, a relaxed fitting t-shirt with lace over the shoulders and upper chest. It spent three days on the front page of Hot Right Now! Sometimes, making trend predictions can feel like predicting the future, haha.
Warning
When you do this kind of trend research, it can be very tempting to adapt your pattern to make it very similar to existing popular patterns - don’t do it! Your biggest asset as a knitting pattern designer is your unique vision and aesthetic. There is no sense in trying to copy others in the industry. Lean into what makes you, you.
It’s like I said when it comes to observing runway trends. It’s great to find trends that resonate with you and translate them into your own aesthetic language. However, don’t follow them too closely or else you will lose yourself in them.
