Designs on a creative enterprise

Tiffany Treloar grew up understanding how creativity could be successfully merged with small business. She gleaned both creative flair and business sense from her mother, celebrated fashion designer Prue Acton, and her father, Mike Treloar. It was in her father's fashion business where she discovered her niche in digital printing.

“I worked for both my mother and my father so I had a really great learning experience. I was always looking for an opportunity to be able to create my own business and obviously my own designs and to find out what I was good at as well,” Treloar says.

Treloar found she was good at creating beautiful textiles through digital printing techniques and this year, the tenth year of her textile design business, she has much to celebrate. She has opened her first retail store on Melbourne's bohemian designer strip Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, has launched a homewares range of her designs and opened an online store. Her business is also being featured in Victoria's Small Business Festival, Energise Enterprise, in the Small Business Heroes Exhibition, this year themed 'The Designers'.

Treloar's designs merge bright colours and dramatic patterns in a format she describes as illustrative collage work. She says she decided early on she wanted to focus her creative talents on textile design, rather than on the style of the garments.

“Understanding that in Australia we've got a very small and highly competitive market - you have to have a really strong hand writing and strong sense of design because people can value that and see there's a real difference in it,” Treloar says.

“Everyone has got access to the same fabrics in the industry - I needed to be able to set mine apart. I loved being able to use computers in design and I saw that was the way I wanted to go. I developed my own digital prints on the computer, and I just pursued that textile side of it - making simple dresses out of a unique print.”

The rapid improvements in digital printing technology made for an exciting decade, she says. When it became possible to print onto organic and natural fibres, Treloar applied for a small business grant for an eco-textile and sustainability project and after this launched a second arm of her collection, Project 332, focusing on eco-friendly fabrics and printing.

Treloar says her creative spirit has meant her business has always been driven by good design, sometimes at the expense of the bottom line.

“There are other people out there who will choose something on price, but it won't last as long. I'll always spend more money on the fabric,” she says.