Confession of an obsessive doll collector
For the past twenty or so years I’ve been involved with fashion dolls in some way or another, and have amassed quite a collection. Over the years, I’ve obtained a couple cameras to take pictures and sell many dolls on Ebay, while simultaneously buying more until my house was overrun with dolls. I even managed to get one of my sisters involved in creating custom doll clothing and accessories, amassing quite a storehouse of clothing and crafting supplies.
As Ebay fees increased, and system rigidity and rule changes made selling cumbersome and difficult, I became disenchanted with the market. Etsy presented similar challenges. Eventually I began working on my own website concept to sell various doll items I’d collected over the years. And considering that I am not a “throw-away” type person, but someone who prefers to give new life to every item through repurposing or rehoming, I had accumulated quite a stash of stuff.
Because I didn’t know much about creating an online store, and prefab products available at that time left much to be desired in the areas of user interface and functionality, I enlisted my sister’s help with this project. She did the heavy lifting to code and create the website. It took quite a while to refine the site design and and take thousands of product pictures. I’m no professional photographer, but my sister and I amassed quite a collection of pictures, which was, for me, one of the most satisfying parts of the whole process.
As I became more involved in the process, I realized I needed an inventory system as well as and other necessary features to manage the entire operation like a small business. Due to the sheer magnitude of the project, we had to put many desired site functions on hold just to get the website up and running. We ended up with a semi-finished site, where we managed to make a few sales before a combination of work-related and health-related problems made it difficult for us to keep up with required maintenance. Eventually the site stopped working properly, and I knew I couldn’t fix it by myself. Meanwhile, the sheer volume of dolls taking up space in my life created a situation where I could not spare the room to even enjoy a small portion of them. Perhaps every avid doll collector reaches this point at some time or another, but it was an uncomfortable wake-up call for me. I’d become a hoarder.
Eventually life changed again, allowing me to devote more time to the process of sorting and clearing out the dolls I wanted – needed – to rehome. Things improved in the build-it-yourself website arena, so I purchased a new domain to create a website I could maintain myself. I had big aspirations to provide a nexus platform for everything doll-related, with a friendly and easy-to-use interface where a thriving interactive community of doll enthusiasts could chat with each other, post their own blog articles and project pictures, and buy, sell, and trade doll-related items. I wanted to include a library of doll resources and reference materials that others could add to as time went on. I’d seen similar sites offer pieces of this functionality, but never the whole package. And most of those sites came and went before I could even join in – some already defunct by the time I found them. Undeterred by the failure of others, I naively thought, “I can do this!”
My vision for the site necessarily included adding a membership function with a user-friendly interface, but I had no idea how to accomplish that, even with new website hosting services advertising “easy” build-it-yourself packages or pre-built templates with “amazing” options to get your site “up and running” in less than an hour! Ri-i-i-ight. My lack of skill and knowledge with web-building and programming, and the huge amount of time I’d already wasted deep-diving into research on how best to achieve the luxury car website I was trying to accomplish on a used-car budget, taught me a hard lesson: “You get what you pay for.” And: “Nothing is ever as easy or amazing as promised.” Paywall roadblocks prevented me from affordably creating the function and design I really wanted. Instead I ended up with a cobbled-up, half-finished mess – cluttered, confusing, and trying to do too much with too little.
In the end, I had a conference with myself and accept the truth. I had lost my way and lost sight of the original purpose of building a website in the first place, to pare down my overwhelming but much loved and much neglected doll collection to a manageable situation where I could, again, find joy in it. So, I decided to redesign everything about the website. Again. For the fourth (fifth?) time – but this time with the Marie Kondo approach of minimalistic design and function aimed at rehoming and repurposing doll items to give them an extended life of usefulness somewhere else besides my cluttered house, hopefully placing them with other doll enthusiasts who would truly appreciate them. Which brings us to the present…
Doll-World.com is up and running. YAY! It isn’t perfect by any measure, but the basic functions I needed are there. It’s been a long and arduous journey to this point, and I hope, if you are a fellow doll enthusiast or a casual doll collector, you’ll give this site a look. Maybe you’ll find something you didn’t know you even wanted!
