Well, we’ve had a lovely Christmas, and thanks for wondering. Today needs a name - in the U.K. it would be the day after Boxing Day, and for many it’s either back to work, or back to the shops for the post-Christmas sales. But having watched the news this morning to see the havoc that is running amok in Oxford Street, London just to get a bargain - well, not for me.

We’ve stayed home today, and cleaned out the study, in preparation for moving computers and peripherals into there in the near future. It used to be my scrapping studio, and trying to shift kilos of scrapping papers and the like was difficult in the very least. I still couldn’t throw anything out, to make way for the software etc to come. There is already one PC in there - it’s our daughters, and although very old, is about to get a second life with the attachment of Fisher Price’s digital art studio, which santa brought her this Christmas. We’re also moving our main PC into there, if possible to get the phone point moved or wireless synched up successfully. There is a large desk there, and we’ll use it as a digital scrapping studio, lol.

I have lots of layouts to do, or show, of course, over the last few days, but wanted firstly to express my annoyance at a couple of items of scrapping news which have not made for a great Christmas within the scrapbooking world. Can’t we have any peace just for a few days?

Digiscrap Designer Closes

Tandika, who has gone off on a family holiday, has simply closed this subscription site because of someone posting the subscription tutorials onto other sites. For $35 per year, subscribers accessed private digital tutorials, resources and forums. It seemed a good bargain, and certainly popular with many subscribers coming onto a DST thread lately discussing this closure.

Now, I’m not a subscriber - although was contemplating it for the New Year,  to access the photoshop tutorials (plus I happen to know some of the people doing the later Paint Shop Pro tutorials on the site). But I am absolutely incredulous that a site owner, no matter that it is Christmas, can simply close down a paid-for site like that, without any explanation to her customers or indeed the designers and tutorial writers who supported and worked for that site, other than two sentences on the site itself.  I am sure that she will, with time, return to communicate and reimburse monies or what have you, with those very concerned customers who raised their concerns on the DST thread. The reason I say this is that I need to - I need to have a return of faith in the digital scrapbooking industry. I personally need to know that these businesses are being run as businesses and that I will recieve the same curtesy  and customer service that I would expect from any other online store or high street shop taking my money.

Yes, it is awful that some person posted those tutorials up onto other sites, and yes, that is piracy of digital data which should only be available to a select few who have paid for it. I do not condone that at all. But for me, as I watch the closures going on so dramatically lately - the worst part of this whole business is the fact that I was saddened over my Christmas break by another loss of faith in a small part of the larger picture that is the digital scrapbooking industry. I lost faith in that particular business owner.

And if she’d had my money? Good grief, would I have been angry. Money means so much to me, as it does to many others, including designers. That $35 subscription rate which I was contemplating, is the sum of several months of petrol allowance for me (and freedom from this village, and independence from my husband), and I would have had to sacrifice several other things to get to it.  To then find that I can not access the very things I have paid for from a website which should be available to me 24/7 (within reason) would be extremely concerning, and not particularly warranted given the excuse of Christmas holidays for the business owner concerned. Why is it apparently acceptable for some people that this business owner is currently incommunicado over Christmas, having taken the brief time to simply close the website down before departing off, but okay to ruin many customers’ own Christmas days with the news that they can’t access the same site, and cause them the worry of not knowing what is going on?

I just, obviously, don’t get it.  But what I did get was the fact that several designers on the DST thread about this actually saw the example given as a way of taking a stand against piracy of data. Never mind the fact that this business was a little different, and the customer base had paid for something a little different than simply taking away a digital product or design. They had paid for access to an exclusive club.

It would be like me paying for accessing weight watchers (for it’s exclusive products, recipes, support groups and the like) and them shutting the doors on my face, just as I arrived at the weekly meeting - not because I’d done anything wrong - no, not even because my cheque had bounced - but because someone out there, living hundreds of miles away from me, had stolen their recipes and posted them on Netmums.co.uk or something.

So, although I applaud those designers on the thread who did consider this a stand against piracy, I would suggest that we take a look at the customer experience here. The hundreds of good, loyal and ethically supportive customers appear to be being disciplined, in this case, at the whim of one business owner and for the actions of a few bad eggs.  When you go into a subscription-based business, you shouldn’t be doing such things.

Similar has happened in crafting businesses previously. Kit clubs in scrapbooking have suddenly stopped. Magazines which I subscribed to have suddenly wound up - and I’m still owed some money from a couple of them, but due to the exchange I just can’t be bothered pursuing that money. E-magazines have a knack of winding up suddenly, and have done this to me on a couple of occasions where I’ve just renewed my subscription, and where there has been no indication that there were any problems.

But just because this has happened before doesn’t make it correct for it to happen again. Two wrongs, and how does this suddenly become perceived as being right?  Perhaps the Christmas message on this one must be a hope that in the future we support those websites and designers who are reknowned for their professional approach, and react with care and attention to their market-base. Perhaps it’s just one of those things.

Junkitz Closes

This one sounds a bit dire also. Stacy and Ken, as owners of Junkitz, have closed shop. They have also, according to some news sources, filed for personal Chapter 13, and from a business perspective, left quite a few creditors. I don’t have a personal opinion on this - Junkitz for me was the company which developed the Junkitz line of acrylics etc which went through a great popularity at a time I was beginning to move over into digital scrapbooking. I have met Stacy before - she gave some interesting classes at the U.K.’s Bonanza scrapping event (now defunct?) and for me - she was just very American, and very blonde. 

I think what it does signify for me, is the problems that scrapbooking as a traditional industry is suffering from lately. No longer peaking, it seems to be plummetting downwards with closures of local scrapbook stores all over the place, closures of magazines and now companies. People worry about the saturation of the digital market with so many designers, and stores out there. But I think the traditional scrapbooking world has a bigger worry about saturation in total.

Scrapgirls Commercial Club

I am fascinated nowadays about how many commercial items there are available for sale within the digital industry. It seems that every woman and her dog (cat?) wants to get into designing, using commercial usage items. I don’t have a problem with any means that a good designer uses to come up with the designs I like - so do not mind the commercial usage stuff at all. However, often this is the only stuff I too can get to use, when working in a  professional scrap for others capacity.

So, I too - often need to save up for the commercial use ribbons etc, simply because there is more commercial usage stuff out there now than ever there might be scrap for hire usage. But the commercial usage stuff is - well, it’s blinkin’ expensive. Now someone about to use this stuff to sell their designs onwards, to multiple customers to make up for the expense of the CU licensed products and their time - they seem okay in investing in commercial usage goods.

But me - I’m only buying it for one customer’s usage normally. So I’m very very pedantic about quality, reusability, flexibility and - well, cost.

Yes, cost.

So, I am currently (until it runs out this month I think) a member of Scrap Girl’s Scrap Simple Club. I joined up months ago, when I was earning, because I liked the fact that I could use the paper templates and blending effects to create all kinds of papers for myself. The Scrap Simple club promises, for $38 per 6 months, that you can access monthly paper and element templates for making your own stuff. 

I know lots of designers used to use these too - but it turns out the templates to make your own papers are for personal use only. So you can make your own papers with those patterns, but only for your own use now. Which makes me wonder why you don’t just buy the papers for a lot cheaper, already made up and available in the Scrapgirls store for a lot cheaper. Rather than gamble on an unknown monthly kit which you then will only use some of the designs from, if relevant to your needs.

But anyway…

Scrapgirls has now seen the commercial light bulb and is offering the same designs as found in the Scrap Simple club, in a Commercial Club now.

I am utterly blown away by the pricing however - the six month equivalent of my Scrap Simple personal usage club of $38 is - for the commercial club - wait for it - $269. Yes, really. For the same designs.

A personal use license for a month is $7, the equivalent commercial license for the same club designs is $50. That would work - if you happened to be a digital designer who created something out of that month’s commercial club goodies, and sold them nine times in the month to nine different customers (at $7 per kit?). But for a professional scrapper, working on a month’s album project for one customer - using something in the kit on only one page for that customer - which could be priced at something like $10-$15 per page; then it’s not viable as far as I can work out - both in a financial and creative side.

It would change my own designing principles and make me into a mass-producer of similar pages or something. I would probably more successfully, simply just buy the one month’s club commercial design for the theme I needed at the time, and not gamble on unknown and unwanted designs coming the next month which I could not work with in an album or project to recoup the $50 outlay.

The commercial use club would, to be brutally honest, cramp my style.

But then, I’m not the market here anymore, obviously.

Ah well. I have nothing to suggest here. I’m obviously in a very different league in commercial usage than the customer set that Scrapgirls is aiming for.  

With this blog post, I sign out for a few days, to allow for the celebration of our family Christmas. Today we’ve caught up with some fun and pre-Christmas chores. Today in England at least (I’ve not caught up with Ireland or Scotland) the entire country appears to have been under a heavy fog - all day. The sun never burned it off, and it appeared very Dicksonein as we drove slowly through it. You half expected a horse and carriage to appear out of the murk beside you, and a highway robber to acost you of your last minute Christmas shopping.

We did the final supermarket shop yesterday, and today went out for lunch and caught The Bee Movie - which I absolutely loved. And we washed the dog (now we’re washing our clothes, the bathroom and the hallway afterwards).

Tomorrow my husband will depart early for work again - being a manager, and one of the few working, he is meant to be  magnaminous and make the 1 1/2 hour commute to work just so that he can then turn around and “allow” all the staff to go home for Christmas at lunch time, lol. While we await his arrival back home, and the start of the Christmas break proper, my daughter and I will attempt to bake some Christmas muffins and cookies. I’ve downloaded several recipes from the net, and will attempt some of the wonderful recipes out there, and see if we can start up a new Christmas tradition this year.

We are scheduled to visit the inlaws for Christmas Day itself, but always look for an early departure home. Nothing beats an early Christmas night snuggled up in our beds, after a long but happy day of family, presents, turkey and avoiding Christmas pudding and brussel sprouts. Boxing Day we will again be traveling out, this time to another Christmas tradition of our family - as a family we go to the local football game. My husband and his father have supported the local team through 40+ years. Now my daughter goes, but only on Boxing Day currently.

Along with all of this I will be continuing to create Christmas journal pages - documenting the days themselves, and I’m sure many more memories will present themselves to my family as the next few days pass. I hope that the next few days also bring joy, sweet memories, and older memories to those having lost loved ones, and will wish you all a very merry Christmas, a happy holiday, and some relaxing family time off.

Speak to you all in a few days time.