What Happened in 2023
Back at the start of 2023, we released a blog post that outlined a lot of our goals for the year, whilst also hinting at other plans we were not quite ready to reveal. Ultimately, we failed to meet a lot of the targets we set for ourselves, or at least that’s how it appears at first glance. Now that 2023 is over, we thought it would be good to look back at all the things we did achieve, the issues we’ve been facing and the all changes we made in the background that people cannot see.
Things we have done
One of our first, main goals for the year was to finish all outstanding semi-custom orders, all of which were long overdue. We knew our first priority was to get them completed to allow us to focus on other, more recent projects, and around halfway through 2023, we finally got the last of these long-standing orders finished. Furthermore, we not only finished the older projects, we also managed to get our order book looking a lot healthier going into 2024, despite various circumstances causing us to fall very behind on mask orders during the latter half of 2023.
Regularly posting to social media was another big goal we set ourselves, as we wanted people to know we were still active and working. We managed to maintain regular posting for the most part, though we found it hard to consistently come up with 3 posts a week, so we ended up cutting it back to 2 posts a week where possible.
A big part of what helped ensure we still had regular content to post was that we finally managed to go through all of our old photos! We did several photoshoots prior to the launch and during the early days of DAME to promote our masks, however most of the photos from those shoots sat unsorted in storage for quite some time, so we thought it was about time we show them off. Each shoot now has its own album in our gallery and quite a number of the photos have been used on both social media and parts of our website.
In addition to the older photoshoots we never fully shared, we also got three new photoshoots done during 2023, even managing to get different friends of ours to help out as models for each one! We are happy how all the shoots turned out and how both the models and mask make each of them unique. We had hoped to do more photoshoots originally, but both due to time needing to be spent on other projects and, in truth, a lack of inspiration when it came to deciding on a theme or even an idea for a mask, we felt it was best not to force ourselves to plan and do a photoshoot without a solid idea or reason to do so.
Lastly, as we hinted at something else being worked on in the background in our previous blog post, we have been making major progress on our new mask framework that we will begin transitioning to very soon. This new framework has a lot of new features that we needed to design, test, fix and polish, so while it may have taken us longer than we wanted, we are happy looking back at the amount of progress made in 2023 on this major project that will form the foundation of all our masks going forward.
Personal Issues / Difficulties
We have had a number of issues that caused us problems throughout the year, and whilst they did all have a knock-on effect on DAME, they were primarily personal issues that affected our mental and physical health to varying degrees. Some of these were ongoing issues that boiled over and caused more serious problems while others were more short-lived but still impactful.
To begin, Emily moved house during 2023, which in and of itself is a stressful and time consuming experience. Despite this being a good move for her long-term, it caused us as DAME more delays than we expected as it was a new-build house, meaning it took considerably more time and effort for her to get settled in. Even now she is still trying to sort out some details, such as a proper workspace to keep materials and equipment in order to make mask work easier and less time consuming.
Furthermore, as people may not know, one or more of us have been working another job to get by throughout the time we’ve been running DAME. Emily went through a series of bad job’s that slowly wore her down and, around the middle of the year, not long after she was attacked by a customer at her other job, things boiled over and Emily found she could no longer cope with all the stress and anxiety so shut herself of from everything for a while.
Unfortunately, this left Charlotte and Lillian to keep things running as best they could without Emily’s input. Ultimately, we ended up making the hard decision to close mask sales for a while, until we managed to check in with Emily, make sure she was ok and get fully back on track. Fortunately, Emily managed to find another job, one that she is enjoying considerably more despite it being more hours than her last job. This has led to a better work life balance, meaning she is able to fit more DAME work around her other job, without cutting out time for her own personal life.
On the other hand, Charlotte quit their job and changed to working full time on DAME a while ago, though has found it hard to adjust to being fully self-employed. They’ve ended up working more and more hours on DAME work without leaving time for themself due to pressure, partly from customers, but mostly from their own family. This led to them adopting a lifestyle of, essentially, only working, eating and sleeping, that in-turn led to them being less and less productive while remaining highly stressed.
However, a few months before the end of 2023, they decided to cut their hours down to around a third of what they were working due to how badly it was affecting them. Despite the sharp decrease in working hours, they’ve actually found themself managing to get the same amount of work done for DAME while living a much healthier lifestyle, with more time to work on other projects or for themselves.
Amongst all these issues, Lillian has been taking on more work to help with running the business while also needing to focus more on developing the new mask framework we mentioned earlier, but they have been finding it hard to fully adjust to the new workload. As they’ve found it hard to keep up with increase in work, it has led to them feeling unable to do anything personal outside of work without feeling guilty.
They have been trying to find what works for them, to be able to work from home while still having a good work life balance. They have been learning how to structure their work goals and break them down into more achievable targets, but still needs to experiment more to try and create a better separation between work and personal time.
Business Changes
Throughout 2023, we have made a lot of changes to DAME as a business. When we originally started the company, we treated it more as a hobby, though in recent years it has transitioned into a business and job for most of us. We found that we were running the business too much like a hobby, where people are willing to do extra work, often far too much, for the sake of completing a project and meeting expectations and not like a business where people should be doing work to earn money. We have spent this year trying to fix that, and whilst we aren’t done, we have laid the groundwork that should hopefully allow us to transform DAME into a real job for us.
One of the main changes we made is to create a budget for all non-customer work. All sales on the site, apart from the current “Gen 2” masks (more on that soon) and fabric samples pay into this budget, allowing us to pay for the time spent on internal development work that people do, like changes to the website or any design work on mask options. We’ve found this to work so far, but the budget is not yet large enough to pay for everything that we would like, though that should change throughout 2024.
We have also recently made the decision to increase our hourly rate; internally we have 2 different rates that we try and use, a skilled rate and an unskilled rate, though we’ve been so busy with orders and trying to fix issues that we didn’t notice the unskilled rate was below the National Minimum Wage! We have since increased the pay rate to bring it in-line with current national standards, though we’ve also made sure to increase the skilled pay rate by the same percentage so as to not devalue all of the skilled work that we do to finish people orders.
Despite all of these changes and extra costs, we have been trying to keep costs down as much as possible in an effort to keep the price of the products we offer down as best we can. For the most part, a good amount of the products on our site are the same price at the end of 2023 as they were at the start, with prices only changing where they need to, in some cases even going down.
We have kept the current “Gen 2” masks the same price and have avoided implementing the above changes as we fear that it would result in them becoming too expensive, potentially making it harder for customers to afford them. However, we cannot continue to exclude these changes from masks work, so the new mask framework we have been working on, the basis for our upcoming “Gen 3” masks, will incorporate these payrate increases. Though, as we have worked to bring down the overall cost of making a “Gen 3” mask, they will actually only be £30 more expensive than our current “Gen 2” masks, whilst also having more features by default.
Lastly, as we have all been trying to improve our mental health, we have spotted a clear issue around holiday time. We have now started to keep track of the dates people are looking to have off as a holiday, plus we plan to force each other to take time off, if we feel that that any of us have not had enough time of already. We are also going to make sure that “holiday days” are only dates that someone has decided in take off in advance, as opposed to days that people are not feeling well and don’t want to explain to others why they have not got much work done, to ensure that peoples holidays are time for them to relax and fully switch off from work.
So, sitting here in 2024 as we type this, a lot of things have happened in 2023 and we’ve made a lot of progress, even if it does not appear like we have. We are now in a much better position than a year ago, and things will hopefully only get better from here, so we are looking forward to showing off some of the long-term projects we have been working very soon.