Cat Coquillette on Design Trends and Art Licensing

What makes a piece of art commercially successful? Cat Coquillette has spent years answering that question through her own work as a licensed artist and educator.

Her designs have appeared on products for major retailers, and in her new Skillshare class, Design to Shine: Create Best-Selling Art That Flies Off the Shelves, she shares the strategy behind art that does more than look good. It connects, sells, and opens doors. Cat shares her perspective on trend awareness, creative inspiration, and the mindset artists need to approach licensing with purpose.

Why is trend awareness so important?

I earn a living by licensing my artwork, which means I need to create art that people actually want to buy. So I work backwards from there. What is my audience drawn to right now? What's catching their eye? Mushrooms have been trending for a few years running, so I've created a lot of mushroom artwork, and it's no surprise that so much of it gets picked up by clients for licensing deals. 

Fun fact: the class project from my Skillshare class Blooms & Shrooms was actually licensed on notebook covers and dish towels with two separate clients last year! That's trend awareness working in real time.

The sweet spot isn't just chasing trends blindly though. It's finding where a strong trend overlaps with your own artistic voice. That's where best sellers happen AND you stay true to who you are as an artist.

What's your secret to finding creative inspiration?

One of the most magical things about being an artist is that you can take anything that moves you and funnel it through your own creative voice to make something completely your own. That's a really beautiful thing about this job.

My mindset is just always open. I'm pretty observant wherever I go. Even a leisurely evening stroll through my neighborhood becomes a little inspiration hunt. A leaf with an unexpected shape, a color combo on someone's front door, a kitty cat I stop to say hi to... any of it can spark something. And then I get to take that little spark and run it through my own style and turn it into art.

A huge part of my portfolio also comes from travel. So much of what I've seen and experienced on the road has ended up in my work. When you move through the world with that kind of openness, inspiration has a way of finding you.

What visual motifs are on your radar for Spring 2026?

I publish a free trend report every year (grab it at catcoq.com/trends) and I am genuinely obsessed with forecasting. 

Water gardens and frogs were a big call in my trend report this year, and I got to watch it validate in real time when the Dior AW 2026-2027 show happened in early March at the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris. They built out a full water garden set with artificial water lilies floating on the pond, frog-shaped minaudières, lily-pad earrings, water lily heels. It was so fresh & creative, plus a full-circle moment for my trend report.

Beyond that, I'm watching horses in a big way (hello, Year of the Horse), a resurgence of Paisley, olives and martinis, bag charms and cute spot illustrations riding the bag charm trend, and alternative animal prints like cow, tiger, fawn, and zebra.

What's the biggest mistake artists make when they start trying to license their work?

Not thinking commercially. I see so many talented artists with gorgeous styles but haven't asked themselves the bigger questions: Who is my audience and what do they actually want right now? Is this artwork trending and relevant in today's market? And what product is it even going on?

You can have truly stunning art, but if you haven't thought about those things, it's going to be a much harder road. The artists who start getting licensing deals are the ones who think about their audience and what's appealing to them. They think about whether the work is tapping into something that's trending and in-demand, and they think about the destination, meaning what product this art is actually designed to live on. When those things line up, that's when things start clicking. When those things line up, licensing starts feeling less like luck and more like a strategy.