It all began with a pair of curtains.
The year was 2007, and Kim Fraser was a woman with a vision. She was looking to make a new set of curtains for her living room and knew exactly what fabric she wanted: yellow with oversized polka dots. There was only one problem. She couldn’t find yellow polka dot fabric for love nor money; no matter how clearly she could picture it, the fabric did not exist.
She shared her frustration with her husband, Stephen, who at the time worked at an online, print-on-demand, self-publishing company with his business partner, Gart Davis. In deference to his digital background, Stephen turned to the internet thinking that surely, in the brave new world of Y2K, there would be a website that allowed people to order a few yards of custom fabric.
Instead, he found that printing custom-design fabric was an expensive and complicated process geared towards large-scale, bulk orders from companies rather than individual consumers. His research unearthed a pent-up demand among sewists and
