License: What You Can Do With a Purchased Pattern

What you take from this lesson: Know exactly what is allowed with a purchased pattern, with no gray areas.

You are buying the right to produce

Buying a digital sewing pattern does not mean buying ownership of the design or exclusivity over it: it means buying the right to use it to manufacture. The logic is the same as a software license.

Understanding this avoids the two most common misunderstandings. One: believing that because you bought the pattern, you can share or resell the file. The other, the opposite: believing that producing to sell requires paying something extra. Neither is true.

What is allowed

• Making garments with the pattern and selling them, with no limit on units and no royalties.
• Producing in your own workshop or having an outsourced workshop cut and sew it.
• Modifying it: changing lengths, adjusting ease, combining pieces, adapting it to your own size chart.
• Printing it as many times as needed, on A4 or on a plotter.
• Downloading it again from your account whenever you need to, at no cost.

What is not allowed

• Reselling the pattern file, whether the original or a modified version.
• Publishing it, uploading it to a group, to a shared cloud drive, or to a download site.
• Giving it away or handing it to another brand or another workshop to use on their own.
• Passing it off as your own pattern to offer a patternmaking service.

The case of the outsourced workshop

This is the most common question and the answer is clear: giving the pattern to the workshop that cuts and sews your production is allowed, because that workshop is working for the brand that bought the license.

What is not allowed is for the workshop to keep the file and use it for other clients' production. The difference is not in who has the file in hand, but in who the production is for.

Beyond the license: labeling

A garment that is sold needs labels, and that is independent of the sewing pattern. The usual ones are the brand label, the fabric composition label, and the size label, plus care instructions.

The exact requirements vary by the country where you sell, so check the local regulations before ordering the labels: redoing them later costs quite a bit more than checking beforehand.

In short

The license lets you manufacture and sell with no limit, modify the pattern, and outsource production. The only thing prohibited is circulating the file.