The First Hundred

Background

There was no community strategy, which in retrospect is the only reason there is a community.

The first hundred pieces went out over about eighteen months to people who had found the work through no organised channel — a forwarded photograph, a mention in a thread about something else, one memorable case of somebody recognising a piece on a stranger in a queue.

They had nothing in common demographically and one thing in common otherwise: every one of them had asked a question before buying.

The Community Journey

For a long time they were not a community at all. They were a hundred separate correspondences, and the only person who could see the pattern was whoever was answering the mail.

What changed it was a mistake. A reply was sent with two owners' addresses visible to each other, which was a real privacy failure and was apologised for properly.

They wrote to each other. Then they wrote to us, together, to ask whether there were others.

Milestones

The first gathering was seven people in a room borrowed from somebody's employer, and it was mostly awkward.

The second had nineteen and worked, because by then somebody other than us was organising it. That handover is the milestone that mattered — the moment the thing stopped requiring us to exist.

The current situation is that we are told about gatherings rather than consulted about them, which is the correct arrangement and took about three years to arrive at.

Community Impact

The most useful thing that came out of it was correction.

Owners collectively know more about how the pieces age than we do, because they have more pieces, in more conditions, for longer. Three material decisions have been changed on the strength of what came back from them, and one of those changes contradicted a laboratory result we had trusted.

They are also, bluntly, harder to satisfy than any critic. A reviewer sees a piece once. An owner sees it every day for four years and notices the thing that only shows up in year three.