Passion for prints

Flett immediately followed that pattern with six more, and her first textile line was born. By 2009, she was selling her handcrafted pillows on the e-commerce site Etsy and could barely keep up with demand. “I was really taking over this poor guy’s T-shirt company,” Flett admits, adding that after almost two years, the shop owner kindly suggested that she take on the printmaking herself.

With her husband’s help, Flett learned the multistep, silk-screen process, first setting up a workspace in their kitchen and eventually moving to the basement, where the couple toiled for hours after putting their daughters to bed. “That’s what we did in the middle of the night after our day jobs,” she says. “We were literally like little elves downstairs for a good two years.”

As her business blossomed, Flett was featured as an up-and-comer in several national magazines, including O, The Oprah Magazine; Better Homes & Gardens; and Real Simple. The exposure—and the influx of orders that followed—gave her the confidence in 2013 to move business operations out of her basement and into the Dana Warp Mill, a historic waterfront property with a rich tradition in textile manufacturing in downtown Westbrook, Maine. With 1,400 square feet of work space, Flett expanded her business to include a variety of bags, tea towels, glasses, wall art and other accessories, and she hired additional staff to help bring her bold, vintage-inspired ideas to life.