Pattern Design Paradox: How Low Prices Promote Exclusion

I wanted to take a few minutes (I hope; these posts sometimes seem to grow and grow) to address how the chronic and widespread low pay in the pattern design field, while supporting financial access to patterns (ie, economic inclusion) actually perpetuates exclusion within the field itself.

And it boils down to this:

As of right now, the only people who can afford to work as pattern designers are

1. The most popular designers who make a real living from it (ie, like 2 dozen people, tops)

2. Designers who don’t actually “need” the money

A little background for context: no one, to my knowledge, wakes up one morning and says, “Hey, I think I’ll be a knitting pattern designer.” Most often there’s a trial balloon of sorts—you try writing a pattern, you release it, a few people download it, you get positive feedback, you enjoy the process, and you decide to keep going.

You quickly realize, however, that to release quality, edited patterns requires both a financial investment and a considerable number of hours. So right here you reach a turning point—you have to decide whether

• designing is your hobby--and that you will continue to spend money and time doing it as such; or

• designing is your business, because in order to publish patterns of the quality you want to produce, you need devote more time and resources to it—and therefore that you need to make money from it.

If pattern design is your hobby, the time and financial resources you can reasonably devote to it are going to be akin to any other hobby—that is, for most people, minimal compared with a full time job, raising kids, household chores and errands, etc. Your output will be small, you may forgo the expense of tech editing, you might keep your pattern layout and photography pretty basic—because pattern design isn’t a top priority. It’s a hobby, it’s meant to be fun, and you’re naturally going to focus on the parts that are fun.

But if pattern design is your job, the time and resources devoted to it will necessarily ramp up, the quality of the patterns you produce will improve, and your income should increase accordingly.

Except in most cases, it doesn’t.

Which is why we have so many pattern designers earning less than minimum wage—but nonetheless continuing to push ahead in the hopes of some day earning a decent living from work they enjoy, all the while making their patterns bigger and better to keep up with the market and accommodate customers.

So, given that background, think about who it is that has the resources to just not earn a living for a few years? (And even more to the point, to put more and more time and effort into not earning a living?)

I’m a good example of such a person. I quit my full time job when JJ was born because obviously someone would need to care for him (and then Ollie) until full day school started in Kindergarten and daycare in the DC area would’ve eaten basically my entire salary. But my husband has a steady job with decent pay and health care, so I don’t “need” the money right now in order to meet our basic needs.

So financially, I, a middle-aged, middle class, suburban mom, have been comfortable enough not to earn much more than pocket change for the last five years.

It’s not a coincidence that this is the profile of most knitting pattern designers.

It’s also not a coincidence that the lifespan of a pattern designer isn’t particularly lengthy. I can list a couple dozen designers who’ve retired in the last few years off the top of my head. Because except for a very privileged few, not earning a living isn’t sustainable in the long term. Despite the privilege that allows us to make that choice in the first place, it still leaves us in a vulnerable position—because should anything happen to disturb the financial dynamic that underpins our businesses (spouse job loss, divorce, emergency, etc.), we cannot support ourselves. And even absent a dramatic change, very few households can sustain themselves on a single income over the long term (at least in the United States).

So ultimately, the very thing we’re trying to change—that fiber arts is by-and-large a community of middle class, stay-at-home, suburban mom types that excludes many others—is paradoxically being perpetuated within the smaller design community by the push to keep pattern prices artificially low, both

1. because patterns have historically been undervalued and knitters are used to getting them for free or a minimal fee, and

2. in an effort to promote financial accessibility within the broader fiber arts community

As long as pattern design continues to be underpaid, it will also continue to largely be the purview of women who don’t “need” the money and will remain out of reach as a career option for many talented women (and men) who simply cannot afford to work for pocket change.

And that’s a real shame.