Sarah Fortescue meets with Rebecca Wright to discuss her and her husband’s fabric business, Rapture & Wright, based in the heart of the Cotswolds, Gloucestershire.
Sarah would like to share her interview with her:
What is the printing process and how does it work?
We hand screenprint all our fabrics and wallpapers to order. The technique is old as the hills with a few technological improvements but the process remains the same. The design broken into repeats and these are separated into colours. A stencil of each colour separation is created on a large screen. The cloth is ironed onto the print table and the screen placed on top so that it matches exactly with the adjacent pattern repeats. Ink is poured onto the screen and forced through the screen stencil as the squeegee is passed across the surface of the screen. Alternate repeats are printed down the table and dried ready for the printers to pass down the table a
second time in filling the unprinted repeats.
What is the inspiration/root of your pattern design?
Inspiration is multifarious. We keep sketchbooks and note books, tear sheets and photos. There are always numerous ideas bubbling away. I once heard it called a creative compost heap from which ideas sprout. I always impress upon students that I talk to, the importance of design history. The elements of pattern and design are constantly repeating through the centuries, the skill is combining these elements in new and relevant ways.
How do you choose your colour palette and what are the best sellers?
Our colour palette evolves, unless you live in a cave, it’s impossible not to be influenced by trends. When bringing out new designs, we strive to make sure that they work with designs from previous years. We have recoloured some of our original designs, our palette has migrated over the last 20 years. Blues are always popular and at the moment earthy hues are making a strong return.
Why do you value being a sustainable brand?
It makes sense. People forget to factor the environment into “value.” Cheapness is not value. When one does a proper assessment, sustainability also makes financial sense. I also sleep better at night, metaphorically.
Was it challenging to go down the clean and sustainable root for you as a business?
When we started Rapture & Wright twenty years ago, we set out to be a different sort of fabric and wallpaper company. Chief among those was to retain as much control as possible, that gave us choices. We had to think and invest long term. Outsourcing production has benefits but unless you are a very big customer, control remains with the producer. The solutions that we eventually developed were remarkably straight forward but we had to adopt a different mindset.
Are your dyes and pigments natural? How are they made?
The pigments aren’t “natural,” They are “organic in the chemical sense in that they come from oil. These pigments make up about 1% of the total ink volume. The 99% is water based. When we built our new print studio. We did a lot of research into natural dyes and pigments. We pretty quickly realised that to make a product that met all the lightproof and wash criteria required and to achieve the colour continuity between batches, we also needed stable pigments that were available year round. So we reversed the problem, rather than changing our pigments , we investigated how to deal with our print waste in a sustainable way without detriment to the natural environment?” The results were better and simpler than expected, that was the light bulb moment.
We are the only print facility in the UK, possibly the world, to dispose of our print waste in a sustainable fashion with the upside that we have created new habitats. To be honest, even if we had found a “natural” dye that were able to use, we would still have to take the same precautions about treating our waste ink. An environmental scientist once told me, “dump a ton of apples in a field, they will effect the biodiversity of that landscape.”
How would you advise others to look at choosing sustainable directions in the interior industry?
It’s a bit of a rabbit hole, once you are in there, every solution seems to have a problem! This is one of the reasons we wanted to be in control. If something is manufactured, it will use energy in some form. I think the over arching issue is sheer quantity. Make well, make to last would be my mantra. From the outset we have printed everything to order, that avoids a vast amount of waste. We are are exploring the idea of composting our fabric offcuts. We are also investigating the whole idea of reselling certain items through a separate avenue.
Who are your main competitors?
We don’t really think of other fabric and wallpaper companies as competitors, it wastes time and energy. Competition often limits your mindset to gaining short term advantage rather than thinking differently. Ultimately, the environment crisis is our greatest competition and that shouldn’t be used as a competitive advantage, I would rather see how we could collaborate.
What are your core values as a business?
Creativity, high quality, fairness, give more than you take.
What next, new ideas and directions (A chance to promote your plans for the coming year)
Rapture & Wright will be twenty one this year. We spend a lot of time considering what makes us different and how we can optimize that. There are some exciting collaborations under way and we would like to continue to exploit the creative freedom that our studio set up allows us.
In addition I’m enjoying our investigations into how we can push our sustainability in new directions. Eight years ago, Rebecca took over the running of her small family farm in Gloucestershire. Six years ago, we moved into a new sustainable print studio that we had developed in a redundant
cattle barn on the farm. Until the 1940s, the farm had employed and trained generations of local workers and supported their families. That dwindled as farming became more “efficient.” The same barn is now providing training and employment for a new generation in addition to providing the means to support the regeneration of the farm in a more sustainable direction.
