What goes with green?

Have you ever wondered how we decide which colours to include in a new textile print? Well, it was quite a process this year with Roof Garden, as we haven’t had a three colour print in our range before, so here’s how it happened:

The process started late 2016, when the design had been decided upon, and we started playing around with colour swatches from our existing range of fabrics. I wanted to do something bold and crazy, so we worked out lots of interesting colour combinations, and then did a range of strikeoff prints, which threw up lots of options, and made us feel all confused.

But decisions had to be made, so we laid out all of our existing prints on a big table in the studio, so that we could figure out which colour gaps in our range we needed to fill, and which new territory we could explore.

Eventually, after much arranging and rearranging, we settled on three colourways that we felt enabled the new prints to harmonise with existing fabric options. But some still needed expanding, so we decided to bring out some old favourite designs like Brancusi Stripe in a couple of fresh colourways as well, to help inject new life into the existing selection.

All of this new colour energy resulted in a massive revision of our fabric book, which now contains 70 different options of design and colourway, all grouped in colours that make sense together. So even though the Roof Garden print is new (and pretty crazy, in this case), it fits in perfectly with our older prints.

Now we have a really strong set of colour groupings to give shape to our communications, starting with the fabric book, our new Lookbook, all across social media – especially on our Colour Yum board on Pinterest – and in our brick & mortar store too (below).

 

Then, as time goes on, and we keep using these prints, and as we see interesting combinations put together by customers, we get even more ideas!

I’ll write posts with more ideas around the Miami and Cairo colourways soon, but in the meantime, if you’ve any ideas for great combinations with our Roof Garden prints, please tag us with #skinnylaminx or #skinnylaminxDIY on Instagram and Facebook.