Alongside our website and socials, HandBound Costumes is very pleased to also be on Patreon.
Here’s the link: https://www.patreon.com/cw/handboundcostumes
We have always found the social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram a little frustrating. The overall finished pictures got many likes and loves, but our passionate little ‘sewing’ photos were glazed over and unliked. And yet for us – that’s the heart of our business. Heartbreaking.
So when we discovered Patreon it was like finding wings, here was a site where we didn’t feel we were ‘boring’ people with our construction discoveries or going to heavy with photos of our sewing as the people joining us on that site were the ones that were interested.
On our Patreon page we share our research, projects, sewing projects – all of the usual stuff but (hopefully) going into a detail that our patrons not just find interesting but also useful for their own research/sewing/love of History. 🙂
When setting up Patreon, we sort of treated it as if it was a college or school – that the more time/ money spent within the school, the more education/facts that person got. This means that our tiers are based on what level of time we spend on you, in a way.
Tier 1 is a our most basic tier but one that is invaluable to us. This is for those who want to see more of what we do that what we show on the socials, but don’t want to have too much info or take too much time to follow. It’s a friendly, drop in, sort of catch up chat style of a tier.
Tier 2 goes a little deeper – we share a taster of the more complex levels of our research, do filmed tours of finished garments, and provide more complete construction details than for the lesser tiers. Again, this tier calls on a shade more dedication from both sides – with our little heart wanting to sweep you away into the wonderful world of historical stitching and journey with us. We’re still playing about with the best way to do this – video vs photos vs ??? – but with constant feedback and ideas we’re hoping to build a good system as to how to go about this.
Tier 3. Here it gets deeper. In this tier we start to have communal video calls with all of those within this tier and up. This is planned for once and month and a topic will be picked out from what is currently being worked on at the time. The research knowledge also goes deeper and the relationship between us and this tier becomes a touch more personal.
Tier 4 is our top tier and we have a limit of 10 of these. The reason is because we do a monthly personal video call – to discuss whatever it is the patron desires. It can be about their own sewing projects and any help/contribution they might need OR it can be on one of our research projects – sharing screens and delving into whatever detail was intriguing them. And because of the more personalised chat, this tier will also get more personalised posts – picking up previous conversations or topics that have been discussed and keeping the thread going.
