Here's an excerpt from a recent email and my response...
"I have resisted joining Artistic ThreadWorks... (because) so many of your designs are cartoony animals that don't care for and would just never use..." -- Margaret
The designs released every month are geared toward what our customers want. When we started our business 6 years ago, the vast majority wanted designs for their kids. Surveys we've done recently show about a 50/50 split with about half wanting "fun" designs and half wanting "adult" designs. We respond to our customers needs so in a typical month we release around 200 designs and we split them 50/50 between the two types.
For example, in July we released 186 designs and 111 of them were geared toward the "adult" market. ( Here are the July 2007 releases! ) So July was a little heavy on the adult side for our customer mix but that's okay. It will all work out eventually.
But even if you subtracted the "kids" designs released in July, you would still be getting 111 adult designs. That's a pretty good deal for the cost of a large cup of Starbucks. :-)
Right now there are over 13,000 designs in the library. About 3,000 are "adult" designs and the other 10,000 are "fun" deisgns. Even if we focused 100% on the adult designs (which we can't do because so many people still want designs for their kids and grandkids) it would take about 3 years of adding 2,500 per year to reach the balance point.
If you can live with about 100 new "adult" designs per month for about the cost of a large Starbucks then just forget about the other 100 new designs that aren't your cup of tea. Along with the 100 or so new adult designs every month, you'll also have access to about 3,000 more adult designs in our design library archives, plus some great articles, online videos, the best embroidery forums on the internet, and a lot more.
