Good Clients - how lucky can a gal get?!

This is what happens when I get a little over-booked, which happens this time of year, and I can't post as often as I would like.  It's crunch time for brides and here locally, there's been a rash of weddings.  Weddings are interesting in that they are sort of catching....with about a 3-year lull, and then magically they gear up again.  I think serious couples go to weddings and with all the ceremony and celebration around them, they can't help but catch the romance in the air.  This is one of those "wedding" years, and I love doing each and every one of them.  For the next 3 years we'll have another drought, then out of the blue, one in a group with start it all up again!

The difference these days is that these are all my friends' kids' weddings so that makes them even more special.  And here brings up something very interesting.  My clients.  I used to think there was some magical creative angel out there guarding over me with my clients.  In my almost 25 years of design and executing those designs I've had two bad clients.  As most of my girls are brides or debs, I don't have many repeats - hopefully the marriage takes, but if the debut doesn't, too bad!  There are no overs!   So I think this is some sort of phenomenal number in the world of business or even  a cottage business like mine.  And I've often  ruminated over the cause, reason or even logic of this.  After all this is the dream of most businessmen/women.

What I've finally come up without my brain exploding trying to analyze this to death, is that it takes a certain amount of moxie to get to the steps of my front door, so I have a built-in good-natured client to start with.  They usually know what they want, have been frustrated by the offerings of ready-to-wear (which is a whole other subject) and are ready to try me.  Of course it doesn’t hurt to have a great reputation, in that the word is out that if you want something and you want it to fit and you want it to look good, you come to me.  So what’s the catch, you ask?  Well, I’m expensive.  For local prices, I’m comparable to the local stores.  The trick is that I don’t do that sort of work.  The work I do is the couture work.  Work that you usually can’t find locally, and sometimes even regionally.  I do the old school methods of muslin fittings, and that means that the muslin fits.  It doesn’t squeeze the life out of you; it doesn’t skim you; it doesn’t stretch to your shape; it doesn’t look 2 sizes too small; and it doesn’t cover you like a gunny sack.  (See ready-to-wear for my rant on this). Even the construction of the dress itself is hand built including pad stitching for interfacing that has special tasks, with some areas getting more “body” than others.  All of this is all built-in so that the dress does just what we (my client and I) want.  This isn’t easy.  It isn’t quick.  It’s taken me a long time to learn that, coming from the school of " Spending 99% of my time trying to figure an easier way out of things."  And then I usually end up finding the fabric, as fabrics stores are and have been closing at an alarming rate.  (Hancock’s is closing two stores in our city!  Boo!)

So back to the moxie - I digress (this happens a lot - sorry).  Part of the “tude” comes from sheer exhaustion of having nothing available to my clients’ liking; part of it comes from just not wanting to go through the wringer of trying to find something for a special occasion; and part of it comes from the very reason I started sewing to begin with - I knew what I wanted, and wouldn’t settle for anything less. A lot of my clients come to my door with the same attitude and they are honestly burned out either with the shopping or the hassle after the sale.

So they’re “pre-primed” and ready to rock and roll with me.  They usually apologize for being picky, and after we’ve gotten through that, then we’re off and running.