Almost anyone can print a fabric now. What does that mean for your business? Inside the design industry’s digital printing revolution.

It was not love at first sight. Like many people in the fabric business, when Stacy Waggoner first saw digitally printed textiles, she was skeptical. “My first job in New York was with Jack Lenor Larsen, and he was very intent that everyone on staff learn about every production method—I was a huge textile snob—and a lot of the early digital prints were, frankly, crap,” recalls Waggoner, now the owner of New York fabric showroom Studio Four NYC.

Though they represented impressive technical wizardry, the earliest digitally printed textiles to hit the design market did not inspire awe. The print mark was fuzzy. The hand was stiff. And while you could use digital printers to print anything, the creativity they inspired was not always so creative. “So much of it was just taking an antique textile, scanning it and hitting print,” says Waggoner. “It was like, That’s not how this should work.”