Digital Sewing Pattern License: What You Can and Can't Do

What the license on a purchased digital sewing pattern allows and prohibits: producing to sell, modifying it, sharing it and reselling the file.

You're buying the right to produce, not exclusive rights to the pattern

When you buy a digital sewing pattern, you don't buy ownership of the design or exclusivity over it: you buy the right to use it to manufacture. It's the same logic as a software license, and understanding it avoids the two most common misunderstandings.

The first: believing that because the pattern is yours, the file can be shared or resold. The second, the opposite: believing that producing to sell requires paying something extra. Neither is true.

What is allowed

• Make garments with the pattern and sell them, with no limit on units and no royalties.
• Use it in your own production or hand it to an outsourced workshop to cut and sew.
• Modify it: change lengths, adjust ease, combine pieces from two patterns, adapt it to your own measurement chart.
• Print it as many times as you need, on A4 or on a plotter.
• Download it again from your account whenever you need it.

What is not allowed

• Reselling the pattern file, whether original or modified.
• Publishing it, or uploading it to a group, a shared cloud drive or a download site.
• Giving it away or passing it to another brand or another workshop to use on their own.
• Presenting it as your own pattern in order to sell it as a patternmaking service.

The question about outsourced workshops

It's the most frequent doubt and the answer is simple: giving the pattern to the workshop that cuts and sews your production is allowed, because the workshop is working for the brand that bought the license.

What is not allowed is for that workshop to keep the file to use on production runs for other clients. The difference is in who the production is for, not in who has the file in hand.

Why the restriction applies only to the file

The license is deliberately broad on the production side and strict on the file side, and there's a commercial reason behind it: what Moldey sells is the pattern, not the garments. A brand making ten thousand sweatshirts doesn't compete with Moldey. A file circulating for free does.