SHALMIAK stories

In my last post I shared my joy in finding the fabric world in late 2012. During 2013 a huge amount of new fabrics were printed with my colourful designs on them... SWEET DAYS, PEPPI BLOOM, THE RACE, SCANDIFRUIT (on me above) - just to name a few of my most memorable creations. A lot of companies contacted me with requests for new designs and I worked almost nonstop. I had so many ideas and I was lucky to have an audience for all my creativity. I also decided to produce my very first own fabric with the design PONY BLOOM. It became a success and gave me courage to move forward with more fabrics on my own.

I also decided to develop a small clothing line with the PONY BLOOM fabric. Marketing pics by Tanja Björndahl.

But often with success there comes sorrow as well. Among all the wonderful people I worked with there were some that didn't like me expanding my business and getting more attention in the fabric world. As a sensitive soul it was difficult to understand why someone couldn't stand my little piece of success and wanted to cause me some harm. But it was a lesson I learned a lot from. The business world can sometimes be very tough. Not all people are good and kind to others but luckily many are and those deserve the most respect. I think ambition is great and it is ok to strive towards success - but not at any cost. You should always respect others and especially those people that have contributed to your success.

Due to those bumps in the road I needed to work even harder. The compensation for commission work got smaller and I needed to create more patterns to make designing financially worthwhile. After a while I started to feel like working on an assembly line - creating designs after another and slowly loosing the enthusiasm I had in the beginning. My main goal was definitely not just to make money but after all I needed to bring some food to the table. I knew I couldn't keep up creating new designs with that speed for very long without crashing. I needed to get more control over my work.

I decided to move more and more into own fabric production but it wasn't as easy as I thought. I tried to co-operate with several different factories but faced disasters one after another - delays, poor quality and bad customerservice. I lost a lot of money and most of all trust in my work.

But I was determined not to give up. Designing meant so much to me and I had to find a way to make things work.

How did my perseverance pay off?

If you are curious stay tuned for more SHALMIAK stories...