Customer Look Book CONTEST

         It is TIME AGAIN for our next installment of our CUSTOMER Look Books! These ones are my favorites, as they provide a broad, imaginative spectrum of what can be done with our corsets!  What do I do with these look books? Well, I pay several thousand bucks to get them printed up on sturdy, quality paper, my husband spends hours on layout, cropping, and texts for the images,and we um.....*cough* just give them away for free.

        A bit of back-story here. When we made our first lookbooks for the company, I charged for them. Yeah, they take an enormous amount of money and work. I figured that if I put other goodies in there, such as ads for businesses where I get my hats and accessories (the ads were always free, because I still suck at asking people for money.), funny little articles, and even some helpful things, then it would be totally fair to charge several bucks and break even.  The first batch sold....okay. Well. Actually, it didn't. If I would have sold all of the 5000 that I got printed up, things would have been going great. As it was, I sold more like 300. I got a little bitter. Not at my customers! Just at myself. I felt like all of my business ideas were complete trash and that I should just give up and go back to being a waitress at Ruby Tuesday (man, eating croutons from the salad bar for lunch and dinner when I worked double shifts! That was the life!).

       I just decided that I would give the rest away for free and count it as a loss. Oh, well. Another idea that failed. And you know, amazing things started happening after that. People would come into my booth, get to touch and feel the products, fall in love with them, but not be able to purchase. However, I still got to give them something from our company to help show love and appreciation for their support, and they were always grateful and impressed. There is no way to possibly quantify how many actual "sales" have come from giving away the booklets for free, but I always have warm fuzzies when I can just be generous and let go of the outcome.

      I have told this to every festival that I've applied for this year (I still can't imagine how you could read my application and still reject our booth!) and I'll say it again. My MAIN GOAL for my booth at festivals is to create vivid memories and experiences for people. Renaissance and Pirate festivals are the only reason I have a job, and if I'm "salespersony" to the people attending, it can turn their magical day around real fast. I take some deep breaths and just tell myself- "Michelle, your goal today is to help as many women as you can feel heard, valued, understood, and maybe...just maybe even beautiful. Money will take care of itself. It always does. Even if you don't make back the money on your booth space, hotels, and gas, you can know that you helped other people and encouraged them to fly. That is what is important. Do the thing!"

 

Um.....Yia. I  hope it's okay that I used this photo....and though I love this one, I cannot BELIEVE how good you have gotten in the past year. Holy freaking freak. 

        And here we are. I've made several batches of booklets since our first one, which was made about 7 years ago. I've learned a lot along the way, and by golly, I learn from mistakes! They are a great teacher, giving the "test" first and the "lesson" afterward.

Onto the rules. I will stop being nostalgic.


RULES for Customer Look Book 2017:

1.All entry photos must be submitted by February 10th, 2017. 
2. Photos NEED to be the biggest format you can send me. I would love selfies from your phone, but they most likely won't work. We need high resolution so that the photo won't end up blurry in the magazine. In our last lookbooks, there were a few photos that we didn't take just because they image size was so small. 
-Please send photos to seamstress@damseldress.com
3. If you are giving props to a photographer, it would SURE be nice if their watermark for their company was already on the photo.  We can put websites and photographer names, but it just looks much cooler if your company stuff is all right there. 
4. If you are chosen, you need to get the model release form back to me ASAP! 
5. While I think it's fantastic to take pictures of yourself that make you look like the seductress you are, it's good to remember that I give these out to all ages. If there is a sweet 10 year old girl that loves costumes, she will get a booklet at a festival. If there is  sweet 10 year old boy that loves costumes, he gets one! ;) Just keep it family friendly and tasteful. 
6. Sorry, but the CORSET in the image must be one of ours. I'm not as picky about the accessory pieces, skirts, pants....whatever. The corset does need to be a Damsel corset. This is a book for our company, so yeah. 


PRIZES!

-Front & Back Cover Prize: $500 store credit to our website. Heck yes!!
-Inside pages prizes: $75 store credit to each of you! If you get picked, you get the sweet freebies.