Today I am excited to announce that we have relaunched our website: reidmiller.us. Please take a moment to check it out. Think of 2 people who would love what we are doing and share our work with them. Thank you for your support in growing our community.
Today I reflect on launches and the fear and excitement they trigger. As I gear up for accepting orders for the Women’s Workshirt for the 100 Blouses project (expected April, 2021), I have been taking the necessary and nerve wracking steps of ordering fabric and notions, scheduling the photo shoot, counting and recounting the weeks of planning and staging to have everything in order. This is not my first launch, I realized over the weekend. In July of 2015 I launched a Kickstarter to create a one professional outfit women could wear on their bikes. In October of 2017 I launched an iFundWomen campaign and successfully raised money to test out a production process to make to measure the Riding Jacket – a versatile, high quality blazer that would allow women to work and move freely in style.
These important launches were not successes in the sense that they launched a self-sustaining, business-ready production model, but rather provided steppingstones to where we are currently – building a local, Princeton, West Virginia based made-to-measure sewing process that makes classic, custom fit women’s clothing while creating local jobs. The launch of reidmiller.us and the 100 Blouses project mark this next phase of work. We have more support than ever before – a committed and talented local tailor and sewing instructor – Lisa Lambert, the brilliant and passionate manufacturing technology incubator team at CART Inc. in Bluefield, West Virginia, pattern making software experts, countless friends and supporters who are experts in tailoring, fine sewing technique, fabrics and natural dye techniques, local community support, and you.
And I am nervous. For those innovative ladies out there, we try and fail and try again. And yet those failures equip us to be successful. We learn hard, valuable lessons. Boatloads of them. Do those lessons guarantee that we will be successful the next time? No, they do not, but it does make it much more likely that we will be successful. I write this for those of you out there doing something new. Those of you who have tried and failed and keeping trying. We can make space for the fear and anxiety of another launch. We can hold space for the knowledge that the uncertainty of a launch also contains in it the possibility of success – of bringing our dreams to life and impacting some small corner of this world.
Perhaps this is not the sort of launch email you expect. But here we travel this very real road together. I do not paper over the emotions contained in our leaps of faith so that we can acknowledge them not as signals of doom, but as a natural fear of taking the necessary leaps to create work and dreams that we love.
Go, fight, win