Changes and new opportunities

Open Sourcing Sewing Blog

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Dear members,

Our last post has created quite a stir in the community so let us explain a bit more what BurdaStyle is, what it offers, and what the changes entail:

BURDASTYLE

BurdaStyle set out to be a community for people that love to sew or would like to learn.

We believe that supplying access for everyone to a platform where we all share our inspirations, creations and knowledge is the best way to improve your skills, get help when you’re stuck and earn reward and recognition for your hard work.

We want this community to be open to anyone and to continue to offer easy and cost-free access to all areas of the site that involve inspiration, recognition and especially exchange of knowledge.

PATTERN CHARGE

We do want to apologize if you may have felt upset by our recent changes.

We at BurdaStyle have always acted with our community in mind, which was also the case while making the decision to charge for all patterns, and feel that this is the point to give you insight into the larger picture:

Clearly our reason behind charging for ALL patterns is to create revenue, in order to produce new patterns, new content and new features and to keep the current site intact. Only charging for new patterns is not able to cover the cost for maintaining the entire content on the site. BurdaStyle would love to offer you all patterns always for free. And clearly you, our community, feels very strong about our patterns and the resource of free patterns.

So why not join forces and work together.

Our plan has been all along to find partners that are interested in working together with us on a variety of activities such as contests, how tos, features and sponsored pattern downloads at times. If a partner chooses to sponsor a pattern we would be able to cover the cost and waive the fee for a certain amount of downloads.

We are in the talk with a fair amount of companies that showed interest in working with us.

Seeing your immense response we were thinking, what about joining forces with our most important asset, our community. What about YOU helping us find partners that are interested in engaging in activities for example sponsoring free downloads for the community

Anyone successfully creating a partnership would be rewarded with the thankful response from the community and a percentage of the partnership fee.

FEATURED MEMBER PROJECTS

Being floored by your talent and efforts creating patterns and creations we felt that you need to be included in our weekly project upload on the homepage. From now on we will accept submissions of creations with instructions and/or patterns from which the best ones will be included in our editorial calendar and featured for one week on the most prominent spot of our homepage. Additionally these projects will have a mention in our newsletter. Send submissions to team@BurdaStyle.com with the subject line: “Featured Project”.

MEMBER’S PATTERNS SALE

Starting with the new site members will be able to sell their own patterns.

We hope that you are looking forward to new challenges and opportunities with us. We are looking forward to the year 2009 and many years to follow with our community!

BACKSTAGE REPORT

Posted by BurdaStyle

07 Jan 2009 03:52 PM

TAGS: Pattern Charge

Comments (58)

COMMENTS (58)

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EmilyKate Ï Posted 7 January 2009 at 4:35 PM
making ALL her clothes, except sox!

This is... kinda cool actually. I'm as sad as anyone to see the free pattern content go, but nothing lasts forever :o).... this seems like an interesting idea, the potential of paying members for useful content they contribute to the site. It's a super-interesting business model for sure, a very new idea most certainly and I think it'll be exciting to see how it plays out. I'll defintiley be keeping an eye out for the opportunities you have mentioned. Here's to 09.
Sew4my3 Ï Posted 7 January 2009 at 5:53 PM
treasure hunting in my sewing room!

Thanks for the explanation. I did have an additional thought about getting better result from your pattern directions. Maybe you could send the un released pattern with directions to a few of the BS members to try out and make improvements to tweak the end result. You would have to put out applications for this ahead of time, but would be well worth it. As a payment for this service you could offer them a choice of a free pattern download. Just a thought. Anyway, I do hope that all the new stuff succeeds as I truly enjoy our little community here. Also, I was curious as to how one might go about getting sponsors for a design and what kind of cost would the sponsor be looking at? Maybe you could do a "how to" on just this subject to help all of us out. Again, we know all know you work very hard, I just think it was a bit of a shock to the system and the comments resulted from this shock. Change does not come easy and people do not like change, but often the result of change is in the positive, therefore I will be on board as I am guessing a lot of the members will be after they see the positive side. So lets get on with it and do this! Good luck!
AllyGally Ï Posted 7 January 2009 at 6:26 PM
http://allystitches.webs.com/

I think this is a wonderful compromise. It's very clear to me that a lot of thought has gone into how to keep Burdastyle going, and make it a quality product & community.

Thank you to the Team for all of their hard work.

I like sew4my3's idea about doing a how-to for sponsorships.

I am looking forward to seeing the new site, thanks again for keeping us going!
minnietheminks Ï Posted 7 January 2009 at 6:43 PM
is doing 5 things at once

Thank you for explaining in more detail about your decision. The part of the site I use the most is the community and since for my studies I should be really drafting my own patterns maybe this new approach will work for me in the future.

I look forward to the new site :)
sunnyb64 Ï Posted 7 January 2009 at 6:54 PM
sewing summery things.

I'll go ahead and echo the thanks for the explanation. It is good to know that the sections like the community and the how-tos will remain free, and geared towards helping us all get better at this. I love the idea that members will be able to come up with patterns that may get featured. And I also wanted to state that I also really love Sew4my3's idea about having "beta testers" for some of the patterns before release-- not only for the feedback on instructions and how well the patterns work, but that would be a great way to have some pattern variations right from the start. Having some immediate options for how versatile a pattern can be might make it a lot more worth the purchase price for a lot of people, too.
isiskali Ï Posted 7 January 2009 at 8:04 PM
scratching her head in askance...

Not so fast.

You want members to find sponsors for you.

You didn't give an explanation as to why you did this with no warning.

You're still charging for flawed product.

It sounds like you guys needed to announce a beta period about 4 months ago to work out all the kinks before you start asking for cash. A nice note is just that - a nice note. Appreciated, but...

The point still stands - what is BS offering that is unique for the cost? Is the product that you're charging for, at $3 to $5 per design, never mind materials, worth it to the customer? And I mean solidly worth it - not in esoteric terms such as "community" or "tutorials". I can get a pattern on the Burda site with 3-4 possible garments for $10. Not so much here. I can obtain it for even less from the Big 4.

Also, there was a dress that was released at the end of December with a charge. It was ill-fitting and badly draped, with many comments pointing out the flaws. Please, please tell me that this won't be the quality of product you'll be selling, because this site will be gone in a year if it is.
erdronen Ï Posted 7 January 2009 at 9:28 PM
unpacking in our new house

Thank you BurdaStyle! Personally, I think you got it right. If you need to create more revenue in order to maintain the site and offer cool features, I think this is the way to do it! Much better than charging a membership fee of any kind. This way, we pay only when we want to download a pattern, and it's completely our option as members! Plus, I believe this site is about much more than just the patterns! Just as you said, it's a whole community for learning and sharing and inspiration.

I also very much like Sew4my3's idea of beta-testing patterns, to help make sure that the pattern instructions are of the quality people expect when purchasing a pattern. Great idea!

Finally, yes I agree that some sort of further explanation on pattern/content sponsors would be helpful.
victorS Ï Posted 7 January 2009 at 10:39 PM
procrastinating!

Thanks for the free stuff its been fun while it lasted. Still think you've shot yourselves in the foot.
lauriana Ï Posted 8 January 2009 at 12:29 AM
trying out her new sewing machine

A lot has already been said about charging for pattern etc. However, I would like to thank you for the new thoughts on 'featured projects' and the opportunity for members to sell their patterns. Of course, with that, enabling some kind of beta-testing option would be great, and actually necessary. After all, one like to make sure that nobody ends up paying for a pattern that's wrong or has incomprehensible instructions. (And in fact, I could really use some help writing instructions...)
doarkface Ï Posted 8 January 2009 at 5:50 AM
unpicking a botched seam

While there are some changes that I am really looking forward to, I don't think now is the best time for Burdastyle to start charging for every pattern. Take a look at patterns such as Heidi, Sabrina, and Liz - all of them great patterns - which have been around for a small fee for quite a while. None of them were downloaded nearly as much as the free patterns by at least an order of magnitude. The new pattern pricing puts these as even more expensive at an ever harsher economic time - how much can you expect from your users? Again, I am very excited about the direction that Burdastyle is moving in, and I understand the necessity of charging for patterns, but I don't think now is the best time for it.