Get a Behind-the-Scenes Look at Screen Printing by American-Made Winter Water Factory

Agustus 29, 2017

Photography by: Courtesy of Winter Water Factory

Stefanie Lynen and Todd Warnock — shown here in their Brooklyn studio — credit social media for helping grow their business. Lynen focuses on design, while her husband handles day-to-day operations, sales, and marketing.

Stefanie Lynen got bitten early by the entrepreneurial bug. As a girl in Germany, she started a "company" with her sister, selling bottles of melted snow gathered from their backyard. They called it "Winter Water Factory." The business was short-lived (even their parents wouldn't buy the water), but her creative energy was just beginning to flow. Lynen soon learned that she loved to make beautiful things with her hands, from paper chains to knit hats — and she'd easily get carried away. "I could never make just one," she says.

About a decade ago, a friend showed Lynen, who started as a freelancer and is now the design director for Martha Stewart Crafts, how to silk-screen, and she was hooked. She began designing screen-printed organic-cotton clothing on the side and selling it at trade shows, where her children's and women's attire featuring sailboats in swirling water, little foxes and hedgehogs, and masses of wildflowers charmed buyers.

For inspiration, Lynen and her husband and business partner, Todd Warnock, brainstorm motifs and look at vintage children's books. Next, Lynen sketches a pattern on paper, fine-tunes it on the computer, and prints it on a transparency, which she uses to create a silk-screen. In their Brooklyn studio, they print small-run yardage to send to a nearby cut-and-sew factory for samples; then a factory in Los Angeles prints the fabric in bulk and returns it to be sewn into clothes.

When they started the business, Lynen's goal was to be American-made, she says, and to "produce a good-quality item that would last and get passed down from one person to the next." Today, Winter Water Factory is sold at dozens of retailers worldwide. She's succeeded, with flying colors.