A New Pattern Design Tool That Will Seriously Improve The Way You Create Your Collections

You know how sometimes you have this vision of your next collection before you’ve even started the design process? You’re sitting somewhere, inspired by something you saw, you snap a pic, grab a latte, and rush to your studio for some serious design work. You often wind up with something you’re really excited about and anxiously start planning your sourcing trips. It’s great.

Until it’s not. You hit up all your usual spots looking for just the right print for the skirt or blouse or handbag lining or whatever masterpiece you’re working on and, damn it, nothing feels right. You don’t get the “yes!” feeling. So you return to your studio and plop down at your computer to start playing around with a pattern-making software that you have yet to fully figure out. It’s technical and involved and there goes your excitement and inspiration.

Not too long ago, we met the founder of company called Genue. It’s a new iPad app that makes it possible for independent designers to {incredibly easily} create custom prints and pattern design for your collections from absolutely anything. When we heard this, we were very intrigued. 

What Does Genue Actually Do?

Honestly, designers, we can’t figure out what it doesn’t do.

First, you can be anywhere, find yourself inspired, and whip out your iPad and start designing. You can take a picture of something and turn that picture into a pattern. You can play with scale, direction, color, repeat, and so much more. You can apply your designs to a figure to see what the print will look like on a garment. And you can do it all, really easily.

Why Do We Like Genue?

1. Any resource that puts the power in the hands of the designer, is OK in our book. As with everything else about building a fashion business, we are always drawn to resources and companies that have obviously thought a lot about the needs of independent designers and have created a solution that is attainable for brands that don’t have an endless budget.
2. It’s such a powerful app, we’re always surprised by some new cool feature that we didn’t know was there before.  A recent discovery was the ability to draw a line using a pattern or texture or even an image. It was so cool.
3. Every time you pick it up, you get lost in a world of design. Honestly, it’s the perfect balance between technology and creativity. Using it, we felt in control of our design direction, we felt inspired and creative but at the same time efficient and in-the-know, like we had come upon something that will drastically improve how to run the design side of a business. Which it will.
4. It’s only 99 bucks for a year!

How Can Independent Designers Use Genue?

1. You can design prints and patterns for your collections, starting with anything from a picture to a simply drawn straight line. Your design options are endless obviously, but more importantly these endless options are incredibly easy to create. It’s not fancy technical stuff that requires months of lessons. It’s intuitive and  there to help your vision come to life. It’s not there to cause frustration or lots of googling “how to….”.
2. You can crowd source your customer’s interest before going into sampling. See what designs resonate most. The money-saving component is major.
3. You can quickly edit your collection based on customer feedback. Change the color, scale, direction, whatever really quickly.
4. You can use it as an internal tool for visually communicating design ideas to your team. It doesn’t just have to be your collection designs. Think about how you could create mock-ups for your web designer or send your custom patterns to a stationary designer to make branded invitations to a presentation. You could quickly show your graphic designer what it’s in your head, rather than trying to communicate through words that never seem to get your point across.

What Can You Expect to See Soon?

We were excited to learn that Genue is working on partnerships with fabric mills, leather printers, trim companies, shoe manufacturers, and other important resources. Hopefully 2015 will bring a list of resources that will present you with a start to finish option for your designing and sourcing process.

We’re hoping to see the app available on tablets, not just ipads, in the near future.

We’re really excited to share this tool with you, designers, because we honestly think this has the power to change how you run your business, on so many levels.

DOWNLOAD GENUE NOW >> 

Though Genue commissioned us to share this cool new resource with you, we never agree to write about anything we don’t think is really awesome. Promise.