How fast did your collection grow?

I got my first doll last year, but was somehow able to get two dolls this year. Funds are limited for me, so hopefully Ill be able to get another one early next year. I wish I could get a doll every few months. There are so many I want. But bills come first.

 

Not very quick at all. Though this year it seems it. I discovered bjds existed in my freshman year of highschool. Though, I didn't know what they were and met my bestie in college in 2004(5?) who introduced them to me and explained this very deep rabbit hole that I've been in ever since. But I didn't get my first bjd intil 2007, my second in 2009, my marg and reggie heads in 2009/10, my third full doll in 2010. But then it stopped and I ended up selling my third doll and the head of my second doll. And got my two SD girls and a sleeping chloe head in 2011 I think. After that there weren't any more purchases until 2013 when I got Corby, Cashew and traded my first doll for Minni. And then I went on hiatus for a few years from 2013 to 2017 and got my first doll in years during the summer luts event, which meant an event head came home too. After that i had a few purchases of heads and dolls peppered through 2017 and 2018, till this year when I had a big leap in spending (I'm sorry wallet). To have the 22 full dolls and 7 heads I have now. So... 14 years? Seems about right.

 

My spare funds are rather limited, so it takes me about a year or so to save up for a new doll. I've been collecting them since the end of 2015 and have three right now.
If you can afford it though, I don't see any problem with growing your collection more quickly.

 

In 2012 I started with a lone Resinsoul 70 cm boy. As a college student with a part-time job, I could not afford any of the more beautiful or expensive dolls like the Soom and Iplehouse dolls I admired. I spent the next 4 years with about 5 dolls to my name. But now that I'm a professional, my collection has grown exponentially to where I need to stop buying dolls and accessories.

 

On the slower end of average, from what I can see. I'm up to 9 full dolls and 3 heads in 6 years, and once I get the bodies for the 3 heads I'm not actively planning on buying more, just working on customizing and sewing for the collection I've put together. Much more than I have would just be overwhelming to me, I think. I already have enough crafting and sewing ideas for the dolls I have to keep me occupied for the rest of my life and then some....

 

I started extremely slowly. I first was interested in BJDs around 2003-ish, but couldn't afford to get my first BJD until 2008. I got three dolls within the first year, all were under $250. For the first couple of years, I think I averaged maybe 3 dolls per year. About 3 years in, I got a better paying job and things just...exploded. I ended up with nearly 40 dolls and almost always had one on layaway or on the way. Around 2013, I cut back, a lot, staying under 20 dolls. In 2015, life changes meant I had less extra cash to spend, so I cut back even more. Now, I have 13 dolls and may end up cutting back even more. I'm at a point that to afford new dolls, I usually need to sell dolls I already have, so whether I sell or buy, I tend to stay around 13-18 dolls. I don't really ever see myself hitting 20 dolls or more again. There are so many sculpts I just love, but I prefer to have a small organized crew. I get too overwhelmed with a large number of dolls.

 

I actually made a list earlier on to see how my family grew since I started...

(End of) 2012 - 1
2013 - 2
2014 - 3
2015/16 - 1
2017 - 3
2019 - 5 (1 full doll, 4 heads and a body)

So not necessarily a lot at a time, just this year seems to have gone a little OTT!

 

I bought my first doll in 2008, just a few months after I first discovered BJDs. I have slowly acquired about one a year, and I will soon be up to eleven dolls. As always, I have told myself this will be absolutely THE last doll!

 

I started collecting early this year and now have 5 bjds from 3 companies, with 2 more coming early next year.
I have 3 dolls currently on my wishlist without any set timeline for getting them.

I'd like to think that I'm satisfied with the variety of sculpts I now own, but who knows. I'd really like to stay below double digits, though.

 

I discovered BJDs back in like 2011 because my mom told me about the japanese making super realistic dolls (who knows what she even meant by that at the time) and thats how I discovered BJDs. I have no regrets about it since I think they are amazing! I got my first doll a Qing from AoD in 2012. I no longer have her. I think the first 3 years after that i had like 6-8 dolls of various shapes and sizes. Mostly MSDs then i got into the larger dolls which i highly prefer these days. I took a break for like 3 years from the hobby though. I'm already leaping in with two dolls on order since one of them basically begged me to get him as the curse of having a creative active mind is you can design ideas before the doll even gets here.

So the summary is this hobby is super addicting and the sculpts keep getting better and better! x.x Incoming major expansion of dolls.

 

Fairly quickly I suppose...? While I didn't actually buy my first doll (in 2012) until I had been saving up and researching the hobby for a little more than a year, after that I accumulated dolls pretty quickly. My first 3-4 years in the hobby I bought roughly 3-4 dolls per year and at my peak I think I owned about 14 dolls at one time.

That being said, i've cut my collection down significantly multiple times since then. In those early years I had my heart set on shelling all my favorite characters from stories of mine in MSD scale, but over time it just became to overwhelming for me to shell so many characters from so many stories and not always having the time/money to really devote to each and every one of them so I ended up cutting it down to just one storyline and halving my collection. I continued to shell more characters from that story over the next few years (though not with the speed I did prior), but still I couldn't help feeling overwhelmed and stressed trying to perfect my most beloved characters in a medium I didn't originally design them for, so in 2018 I decided to let got of all the characters from that story to sort of "restart" my collection with less restrictions. Instead of shelling my old OCs i've been creating new characters around SD scale sculpts that I like and i've found that to be much more enjoyable and fulfilling, but in having no real restrictions I now feel as though i've once again accumulated dolls a bit too quickly and now realize that I prefer having mostly smaller dolls. I'm planning to sort of "restart" my collection again sometime soon (and get the few new dolls I want much more slowly!), but now I finally feel like i've had enough time and experimentation to truly know what I most enjoy and want out of the hobby. Its funny, back in my early years I thought i'd get the most enjoyment out of the hobby only if I had a huge collection of 20-30 dolls, but now I realize that having about 5-6 dolls is my ideal so I have plenty of time/money to spoil all of them all the time~

TLDR; but my collection has fluctuated between growing and shrinking over the years as I get very passionate about new doll projects and thus sometimes jumped into getting too many dolls too quickly. I don't regret any of the dolls i've bought/sold over the years and i've cherished the time i've had with them, but I do wish that I had taken things a bit slower and been more critical with myself about the things I enjoy/value most for myself in the hobby.

 

I'm still relatively new, but I went from one doll to five in the span of about three months, after only having a single (vinyl) doll for about a year.

Two of my dolls - my dollfies, I picked up by pure happenstance/randomly placing bids on ebay to see where they would go.

 

My collection grew WAY too quickly, and unfortunately it's still growing. I first started the hobby roughly 2 years ago, and in 2018 I went sort of nuts because I started to figure out how to find good deals and then couldn't resist them... I must have bought at least a doll a month, which sounds absolutely mad to me now.

in 2019 I feel like I've sort of slowed down, since I use taobao now so everywhere else (including secondhand, a lot of the time) seems horribly expensive. I hope I'm kind of coasting to a stop- I have upwards of 40 dolls now, and I never wanted a huge collection.

 

Mine grew like wildfire. Two years ago I received a doll for my anniversary. By the end of that year I had 5 dolls, At the end of last year I had 7 dolls and my husband had 4. This year has been a big year for me. I purchased four dolls in one event and a few over time. I now have 10 in hand with 4 on the way and my husband has 7.

 

About one doll a year, for a current total of 3. I don't actually anticipate owning more - if anything, Spouse might get another one and I might customize one for another friend, but I am really enjoying my current crew.

 

Pretty quickly.
I joined the hobby in 2017 after admiring it from afar for a couple of years.
I got my first 2 dolls in my first year.

In 2018 I bought and received 5 dolls as well as buying 3 more which didn't arrive until this year.

And this year I've received 6 dolls up to now - 3 of which were bought last year and 3 this year. I've also bought 4 more but I don't expect them until next year.

Considering I was originally only going to have 5 dolls I sometimes feel I've gone a little overboard. I plan to slow down a bit next year but I'll have to wait and see how that actually goes.

 

I've gone from 0-4 in the space of 4 months(but I came back into the hobby after a long hiatus). That being said, they were all(to me at least) great deals on the second hand market place and one was a partial gift.
But I have to pay off the debt I collected getting them. So unless a Pukipuki or Realpuki come up for a steal of a deal, no more dolls untill I pay off the first 4 and their parts.
I think it really depends on how it hits you financially. Can you pay your bills and still function in society as you need to(pay for your own meals, ect)? If you can then I wouldn't worry about it.

 

About one doll a year since 2017. I first discovered these dolls in 2014, bought my first in 2017 (Iplehouse Lucia nYID) and my second (in the photo Iple JID Faline) last year. I now have a Iple Creaa on layaway. Funds are tight here (my horse takes most of my money lol) but I would probably have two more if I had the $. Have fun and enjoy your hobby

 

yowza, way faster than i've been ready for lmao. my wishlist has either been cropping up on the secondhand market or being threatened by discontinuation so it's been a far faster rollercoaster than i expected (or really wanted, to be honest).

not that i dont mind having a lot of dolls! but i do think i would have preferred a bit of a slower acquisition rate, since some of the fun of the hobby for me is pining and planning - having distinct goals to work towards is nice.

also, the doll that was intended to be my second or third is now going to be my sixth or seventh (if we're counting the blank head i have, anyway) P: I've only been in the hobby for three years and i mostly have SDs!! how did this happen!!! my wallet is so upset. so upset...


i guess if you think of it as one full doll / one completed doll per year thus far that's not quite as frighteningly fast but.... still, lol