Wanna Be A Hero?

Still on the subject of Halloween, I've been adding an outfit a day for the last few days, and I've now come to the one and only comic book/super hero inspired outfit-which so happens to be Rogue.
This is a first as we've stuck with fairytales and good old fashioned style Halloween themes before, so this is a slight departure from normal this year.
Rogue is made up of a skirt, corset and jacket combo. The corset is something new also, as it's the Freyja style but with detachable sleeves, which is new for this style. So the corset can be worn completely sleeveless or with full sleeves with turnover cuffs.
The jacket has mock lacing up the arms and laces up the front to tie in with the corset, and the skirt is made from the most insanely beautiful fabric-it's a gorgeous faux silk with a linen finish and feels amazing and has the most beautiful flowiness to it, I'm honestly in love with this fabric as it's a dream to both work with and wear as a skirt.
The outfit is listed in our Etsy store now (you can get there through http://www.aliceandwillow.co.uk/ also for a direct link) and as with all our other Halloween outfits this year, it'll be available as one complete outfit with all three items, or each individual outfit can be purchased if you only fancy part of the costume. As an added way of getting you to buy more, the combined price of the whole outfit purchased together is a fair bit less than purchasing the individual parts, so it's an almost guilt free purchase as well.

As an aside, in the run up to Halloween we'll be posting on our facebook page each day with links to awesome accessories for each Halloween outfit of this year-one day might be showing you where we bought an awesome prop for the Circus outfits (still to come), another day might be showing you how to recreate the make up looks for certain costumes.

ArtFire

We're relatively new to ArtFire, but are trying to separate out our stock into two types-current and new collection stock, and older styles/one-offs/end of collection pieces/discounted items.
From now on, all current and new collections will be available on Etsy, and all sale items/end of range items will be available on ArtFire (with the exception of our Black Friday sale, which will be split between the two sites). As ArtFire is a little cheaper than Etsy to use as a seller, we can offer even lower sale prices on ArtFire than we could on Etsy, so there's bigger savings, and maybe just enough money to buy that extra corset/skirt/jacket you fancied.
We're going to be separating out our Etsy store today, and you should see all the current Etsy sale items appear on ArtFire later today, at even greater reduced prices.
We've also got another announcement tonight, which I think will please a lot of you..  

Halloween 2011

Trying to learn something from last year, and remembering how tiring it all was, the prep for Halloween this year started at the beginning of July.

Usually this starts with a full evening of sitting around with various snacks (which this year consisted of pizza, crisps and a bottle of wine) and going over how last year can be improved on.

Early planning was key this year, as we had two events that were going to coincide-the release of the Halloween collection, and only two weeks earlier was to be the launch of our first major A/W collection. That's planning fail number one-not the best idea to have two such big events within such a small time frame, but with advanced planning we'd manage quite well.

So the evening of planning consists of making Halloween 2011 better than 2010, and this obviously includes the costumes we make.

I'd sketched over 20 outfits out with various annotations as several had really complicated details-these were the first to be scrapped just for sheer logistics, and because these designs would have taken four times longer than all the other, we either had to scrap them (which is what happened), cut out all the amazing details (wasn't going to happen), or charge several hundred dollars for a corset (again, not an option). The last option was to offer these designs at a loss and hope that our lovely customers would take pity on us and buy other things to go with the corsets, but that also wasn't going to work.

So 20 designs quickly became 16. We'd also decided to offer several of last years designs as they'd be so popular, and we'd already had enquiries about whether they would be offered this year-so we had to factor in all the time taken for those designs as well.

After a couple more hours of wrangling, and a bottle of wine later, the 16 remaining designs were cut to 11. The next task was to make sure that all of the designs were feasible, in terms of time taken, costs and what they would be sold for to still be reasonable for most people. Some of the designs were perfect from my first drafts, several changed in certain aspects, and some changed completely to be less labour intensive and more affordable.

These 11 new designs were added to the 9 carried over from last year, and here we stood with 20 Halloween designs.

The designs all get made up and then any little tweaks are done at this point. This process tends to be a little long winded as the designs all need to work as well on a size 20 as they do on a size 6. Once done, the next step is the photos-this is my favourite part as it's the culmination of all that hard work, and seeing the designs modelled and made up is such a great feeling, when all they've been before is a sketch on a page.

Anyway, now all the designs have been photographed and are ready for this Halloween.

We'll be releasing the first designs on Tuesday-the 6th of September-and will be releasing the designs on the space of a week. The designs will initially be made to order for the first three weeks whilst we make up stock of the ranges, and will then be available to purchase and shipped out immediately.

To make things run smoother, anyone who orders one of the Halloween outfits this year will receive upgraded shipping for free-so all Halloween outfits will be sent by 1-2 day courier for no extra charge.

We will also be offering the different parts of the outfit separately as well as together-you'll receive a discount for buying the whole outfit against the individual prices, but if you just want one aspect of an outfit, then this year you'll be able to just get it and go.  

And as a reward for getting this far, a sneak peek at two of the new designs for this year-our Ring Master and Clown designs.