2020 has been a year like no other, to say the least – and we hope that you have all been staying safe, healthy, and happy these last six months. While COVID-19 continues to throw operational challenges our way, we have been luckily enough to continue business as usual working from home, and we are very grateful for the support of our customers through our Spring launch and the ebook release of Dressed.
This year has not turned out the way we expected, but we are happy to report that both the launch of Passiflore and Dressed were a success. Dressed in particular was a project we have spent the last two years working on, so to finally have it finished and released in English as well as French has been a joy and a relief. We were uncertain how the ebook would be received (you can read more about why we made that decision here), but the reception was better than we had hoped. We have enjoyed immensely seeing a wider audience plan their new wardrobes and create the new patterns included in Dressed.
Operations
When COVID-19 hit in March, we were in the middle of finalizing our spring pattern launch (luckily we managed to photograph Passiflore with minimal resources), as well as preparing for the ebook release of Dressed. Everything slowed down as we all learned to adjust to our new normal, but with those projects behind us things are starting to feel relatively normal.
Our team continues to work from home and social distance to remain safe, and although we miss the studio, we are able to complete much of our work remotely. This is less true for the final stages of pattern production, which continues to be a challenge. Most notably, product photography will continue to look a little different as the pandemic wages on. Camille will be skipping her usual return to France this time of year, and as many other indie designers have had to do this year, we will be returning to our roots by putting Eleonore in front of the camera again to help photograph our Fall/Winter release.
Patterns and Shipping
Our printer shut down in the beginning of lockdown, but the good news is that we have managed to restock most of our paper patterns now. The situation does seem to change weekly, however, so please be patient if we experience delays in restocking some of our more popular patterns.
In a similar vein, shipping times remain unpredictable, and as such we are still recommending shipping via private carrier to track your orders and prevent delays.
We are also happy to report that all of our patterns are now available in PDF format! This continues to be the most reliable way to access our patterns immediately, but don’t worry – we are as committed as ever to providing paper patterns and are doing our best to make sure these remain available for our customers.
End of 2020 and Beyond
Now that the Dressed release is behind us, we have turned our attention to preparing the final stages of our Fall and Winter pattern collection. We don’t want to give away too much, but it should be ready very soon and we are excited to share more in the coming month. We can also confirm that we will have plenty of paper patterns in stock for release day – so no matter what you prefer you can enjoy the new patterns sooner rather than later.
We have also been working hard behind the scenes to ramp up our communication both on the blog and social media (one of our big goals for 2020). You can expect to hear from us more frequently as we finish up the year, so if there’s a specific type of content you’d like to see more of, please let us know!
