Hello! Ok, so it has been a little while since we last spoke about fabric, but it's been for very good reasons, we promiiiiise. While the British summer has tried to entice us out of our new HQ / breeze block temple in West London, we've been laying the groundwork for the action packed couple months ahead as it all finally (am I making it clear that there have been just a few hurdles along the way??) starts to come together.

Printers, inks and cottons aside just for now, let us turn to the web development - in particular the fabric customiser - that we need. In a way, this is perhaps the most exciting part of this whole shiny new fabric printing set up. And that's because, while all the other products (impressive though they are) could be considered 'off the shelf', the web development is our chance to build something from scratch, entirely bespoke and entirely ours.

And so we took our time to find the right team! For the development side of proceedings we found a great bunch in the shape of the gang at ZipBoss over in the US. These clever chaps have built a web platform all of their very own, meaning that they can be flexible and adapt quickly to new requirements. They've also developed a bit of a knack for creating websites and apps which allow customers to build and customise their physical products online - basically, a perfect fit!

Not only does our fabric customiser need to work, but it needs to look great too. Which is why we turned to Katie Marcus, sewing blogger, offline pal and UI Designer. We'd worked with Katie before when she did the design for our Circle Skirt App and knew we liked her style. Also, as an obvious huge bonus, she is also a keen sewist and customer of ours, so again, perfect fit!

We thought we'd share a shneak peek of the web design now that we have it all finalised. It really is only a peek though, mind! Apologies for being so coy, but we reeeeally want to maintain a little bit of the intrigue for now. 

You can find out more about ZipBoss here:

http://zipboss.com/

...and check out some of Katie's work and follow her online antics here:

http://whatkatiedoes.net/portfolio 

http://www.whatkatiedoes.net/ 

https://twitter.com/whatkatiedoes

And to round off proceedings, last week we went to watch our printer in action and were so impressed and excited - it's getting very very real y'all! 

Next up in the grand masterplan: build our printer a little house within our HQ to keep it clean and air-conditioned, because she can be a bit of a diva. Photos of us covered in sawdust, carrying drills and painting palm trees on the walls soon to follow! 

Till then,

x

Charlotte