Returning to the hobby after years of hiatus?

I took a long break and started coming back into it in 2019 when Fairyland released Honoka, incentive. Now that I've been into it again for a few years, I can say the hobby has changed so much but it's kind of better and worse simultaneously.

The community is so much bigger now and it's great to be able to find doll friends and yeah, the options are amazing. So many doll bodies can do crazy poses now compared to back when I got started when minifee bodies were said to raise that bar. There's a wider range of clothing and accessories too so we can really style our dolls more uniquely. And there are people out there who have really perfected their craft so quality stuff is easier to find. I'm finding more faceups artists all the time too so that's been more fun to shop around and look at all the work in their portfolios. When I came back to it, I had such stars in my eyes.

With the growing interest in bjds though, the demand for cheaper dolls has also gone up and recasters have taken advantage very successfully. And there has been some drama in regards to recasting but also on the social side. I don't like to spread rumors and generally try to stay out of that part of the hobby but some of the stuff I hear through the grapevine is so disheartening. I won't get into details but I was limiting my personal interaction on the bjd socials to stay out of the mud.

Bjd socials isn't all bad though. There is a little pressure to stay active and relevant which can make polite casual interaction feel sort of forced but that's how you meet people. I've made some friends on Instagram, getting to be more chatty in their DMs and learning so much! The community there can be so amazing like recently, I've had to post stuff for sale due to a financial struggle and people have been boosting those posts for more reach. They didn't have to do that and I didn't ask, they just did. Faith restored.

Apologies for the rant I generally keep this stuff inside so I can go on and on but I'll spare the reader

 

Yeah it was shocking for me too when I got back into the hobby last year! I took a six+ year break as well due to lack of monies and disinterest at the time. It has EXPLODED. I mean I remember looking at dolls in 2010-2012 and thinking how many choices there were! And now the goliaths of my time are no longer top dog. Well they still make beautiful dolls but it's really interesting to see how many of them aren't holy grails anymore and how many other companies have taken over in styling. I remember when Doll Chateau first came out and how many people were commenting on how unique the dolls were and some were questioning if they were going to last. But look at them now!

The community has changed but it is a good one I think. The demand for dolls has meant companies have been gaining more money and can create more and keep staying afloat. I do miss some of the old brands such as Boy and Girl or Doll In Mind but alas.

 

Yes, I do remember that about DC! I thought those dolls were so strange but I was such a newbie. They definitely found their niche and I understand the appeal. I think they definitely made room in the hobby for other artists to come in and try new things with sculpting dolls.

I was really surprised when Dream of Doll went silent. Their fullset outfits were so popular that people were cosplaying their dolls. I really wish I had kept mine just for that nostalgia factor. It's just funny because at today's standards they really weren't all that special. My heart still skips a beat when I catch the rare sight of them in the wild though.

Minifees also got even more skinny haha

Aside from companies, there's been an explosion of art dolls too. Artists working with casting companies to bring us limited works, it's really amazing. Over the years there's been some trial and error and new artists can learn from the successes and mistakes made. The whole process seems more streamlined now, the future is bright!

The bjd scene is whole different jungle now and can be overwhelming and scary but I'm excited to see what happens next!

 

I left the hobby when I got married and moved to another country. With the start of a new job I found my love for the hobby came back. I had 3 dolls and now I feel like I have too many. I never imagined having so many but they have brought excitement and creativity back into my life. I have even tried my hand at faceups. Im still bad at it but I enjoy the process.

Since coming back to the hobby I have been obsessed with Dream Valley.

 

Nice. Thank you for sharing your story,

 

I just pulled my dolls out of storage after 7 years away. Can't believe I can still remember my log-in!

 

Eiyo! I'm pretty much in a similar situation! Though I wasn't 100% gone (I sold off over half of my collection in the last several years and bought some sculpts to reshell some characters that ultimately ended up sitting around waiting for me to be back in full swing for a really long time), I've been practically in a dormant state since 2017. That was literally the last year I actively tried to take photos of my dolls and/or had any sort of inspiration for them. Finishing uni and moving back to my hometown which I hated, starting a thankless job, missing my friends, poverty, and eventually my mom falling ill and then passing in early 2019 effectively crippled me emotionally and creatively in just under two years. It was then I decided that I wouldn't let depression win over me and hit the ground running and... in less than a year I found myself expatriating to another country, and before I even had the chance to settle down covid hit like a tonne of bricks!! And, like that, another three years passed in the blink of an eye.

I've had small moments of touching back down in the hobby between then and this year but all were very brief and far apart. Then I finally completed my first doll since taking this ginormous break, my minifee Alan, my Venti, whom I bought on a complete whim as a sort of emotional support doll when I was going through a hard time last year. (it took me... only, maybe 4-5 months to get around to giving him a faceup, if that's any indication of my state before) and suddenly it all clicked back into place. Since then I put forward all of my dolls and have started doing maintenance on all of them and it's overwhelming but I love it all the same. I pooled some funds and bought some much-needed bodies for a couple floating heads, cleared out dolls that no longer worked for me, repurposed several to fit my stories, and am getting ready to place some massive clothes orders. Then I dreamt up the story of Genshin Gymnasium while looking through my uncle's old german boarding school photos that he posted on Facebook, and there was plot, and my love of dolls multiplied by my love of genshin made my wishlist explode for the first time since maybe 2014 (it was normally a very reserved wishlist just a couple dolls long, I swear).

For the social aspect, I'll be honest, I'm still recovering from the shock of being doused in inspiration and trying to reconnect with the community. There's so so many new companies now, new dealers, new options... At the same time a lot of my go-to places to buy anything either no longer exist, only sell extremely limited quantities or are lacking in variety and I have to research and relearn everything from scratch. The community also feels more segmented and harder to reach (I just want to make some new friends, please!!!). Den of Angels is quieter compared to when I was active, and so is tumblr, while instagram has become nearly impossible to be on and interact with people... The marketplace is slower but still there (just found my grail of over 10 years not two weeks ago, I'm REELING). I can't find youtube creators anymore, and a lot of the content I used to consume was there before my break... and yet at the same time there seems to be more bjd owners than ever. Maybe is just a matter of getting acclimated again!

 

Welcome back, Grey. I've missed seeing your mods around. They were always interesting.

 

After 10~ years I finally decided to get back into the hobby and wow!! I feel like it's a whole new world. Was sad to see that D.I.M Doll are no longer in business, but excited to get into the hobby again. It feels just like when I saw my first BJD in 2008.

I quit the hobby when I was about 19-20. Had just gotten into a new friends group and I didn't want to tell them about my interests in BJDs because I was afraid that they would think it was weird.. Unfortunately, I forgot about the dolls while trying to catch up on other things in life. Now I'm 30 and very secure in myself, so the dolls are back.

 

I took a long break from buying dolls (and subsequently from the hobby) for about nine years (≈ 2013). I too no longer had the finances to support the hobby at the time. The hobby never really left my mind as I completed high school and college; I would occasionally log on to DoA but I used it less and less over the years. Throughout the time I was gone, I did keep my dolls and still feel bonded to them! I did, however, become detached from one of them and have since sold her recently.

I became interested in getting back into the hobby around November/December last year when I was about to graduate college since I would finally be able to save up for a doll and not have to worry about school. It was a little wild getting back in since I also realized that quite a few dolls I wanted were no longer available, there are even more companies with beautiful dolls (and some companies that changed styles), the spread on other social media platforms is more vast, etc. It almost felt overwhelming, but I found that getting back up to speed hasn't been as daunting of a task as I thought. I retained a lot of the knowledge I had and most of it wasn't outdated. Although it's sad that some of the dolls I wanted are gone, I love that there are even more options and I'm still discovering new ones. Not mention, it has been easier than ever to get information on companies and dealers, tutorials, artists, ordering and shipping questions, etc.

My first doll purchase after my hiatus is a Soul Doll Seo Jeong-U, who I'm still waiting for to be shipped (purchased in March); I also recently put a Ringdoll Hua Cheng on layaway. I'm very excited for both of them! As for the dolls I already have, I have newfound motivation to complete the two who are not complete, and to update the other two to give them a new wardrobe that will better fit their characters.

Socially, I haven't been super active within the community apart from posting here, and that hasn't changed within those nine years. I'm content with where I'm at right now on my journey back into the hobby, but there are still things I would like to learn about or try eventually! I'm just glad that the community has a larger reach than ever so this information, whenever I may need it, is available!

 

I only very recently returned to the hobby, after having been fairly active between 2004-2014; various house moves, having to homeschool my youngest for a year, getting married and a whole slew of IRL issues meant the dolls basically got put on a backburner. they went into boxes and crates for the last house move and just basically didn't come out again until the past couple of months when I had the sudden urge to shell my WoW RP main character, Derenly, into doll form and embarked on modding my Lishe into a boy, sculpting blood elf ears and so forth. The project has definitely reawoken my interest in the dolls again; I dug Marius, my Dollshe V2 Hound, out and gave him a new face-up plus a new replacement wig for his old red one that was looking very ratty after all these years. And now I'm pondering hunting through to find which box my Minifee Shiwoos are in....

Socially, I've joined the BJD Discord server (I'm far more active on discord than I am anywhere else, so it was a logical step for me) and posted for the first time in years in the small little UK Facebook BJD group that I used to be active in; the folks there made me feel very welcome as a returnee, and I've had an invite to join some of them on their next doll outing here in London. I'm not hugely active on Instagram, though I've been posting the progress pics of Derenly there.

I don't have any plans for doll purchases at the moment; I'm focused instead on rediscovering my love for my existing dolls, one or two at a time.

 

I left the hobby around the 2016-2017 era, as I had just clawed through a pretty bad break up and had a lot of mental health issues I needed to sort out. After neglecting to do anything with my dolls for a while--even letting them collect dust--I put them away and wasn't sure if I would return. At the end of 2021 I became really interested in the Gem of Doll Capricorn and purchased her. Not long after that (or maybe even a little before that), I returned to the social media side of the hobby.

It's really interesting to see how some things have changed, and others haven't. Some doll communities are more utilized than others, and Instagram has definitely become a place for doll photos, which is great! I'm slowly picking up on things I missed since I was gone, like doll companies that have closed shop. Other than that, I'm staying pretty busy updating my current collection, since I completely changed a few of them. I also sold a few dolls so I can add different dolls to my collection. It's kinda fun to see even how I myself changed in how I display my dolls.

 

Big same!! I've been in the hobby for over half my life at this point, so prepare for a ridiculously long story lol.

Spoiler: TLDR had some bad times, took a break lol

I took a break from the online side of the hobby for several years, and to some extent the hobby altogether. In 2010 I had a bad experience at a doll meetup at a convention where the locals literally didn't speak to anyone that wasn't a member of their local comm, and us visitors just kinda hung out by ourselves a few feet away like two teen cliques in a cafeteria. I had moved away from my own local community for school and it was pretty demoralizing. It made me miss my local comm terribly, but my local friends were at more stable points in their lives, moving for work and getting promotions, and it was hard to get people from the wider area to be willing to travel for meets (to me, South Florida is like, Dade and Broward county, the coastal bottom right corner of the peninsula, but to some people "South Florida" was pretty much anything south of Orlando and they'd be unwilling to commute but expecting us to travel every time we tried to make plans, lmao, classic local hobby comm problems). Looking back on it, there was kind of an unspoken expectation among a lot of people in the BJD hobby that "doll meet-up" meant huge tables full of dolls, dozens of people, and that was pretty unrealistic outside a few select cities or special events like conventions. I was flat-out told "I like to see a lot of dolls at meetups, so if it's only gonna be like four of us I'm not coming" a couple of times, but I think that sentiment was more widely held than people admitted at the time. So as our core group of locals got more and more unable to make it, the local BJD scene kinda sputtered and died for a while (at least for me).

Not even two months later I had a terrible experience where a BJD package of mine was misdelivered to a nonexistent address six hours away from my home and it was never found or returned. It took a heavy toll on my BJD enthusiasm, I'd look at my dolls and think about the lost package and just not be able to enjoy myself. I slowed down taking photos, let alone posting them. I'd occasionally order a new outfit or two, occasionally get out a doll and play with it a bit, but that was pretty much the extent of it. I had a gradual reentry a few years later as Mint on Card (rest in peace) announced its closing, and saw an uptick in my BJD activity, but I was still spending most of my time enjoying other hobby dolls (shoutout to Monster High for somehow keeping my mental health afloat as an exploited first-year teacher lmao).

I think taking a break from the hobby worked out pretty well in the long run, because I take it way less seriously now than I did as a kid. All the old drama that used to come to the fore every day is nonexistent - be glad we don't have a Debates forum anymore y'all, holy moly - and we've had so many pioneers be brave enough to test out materials, paints, sculpting styles, the hobby is a much less hostile place than it used to be! Not to be an old fogey but I remember back in the day the cadres of people who made sure we all knew that the only sealants they felt were acceptable were MSC and Tamiya UV Cut. "You're using sealant for MINIATURES?! Ugh, you're going to melt your doll and die, I wouldn't even THINK of doing such a thing on my precious resin when those products are made for cheap mass-produced plastic" type of comments, lol, there were a lot of folks who were very vocally anti-experimentation back then! Without all the people looking for creative solutions, and advocating for and creating different body types for dolls themselves, this hobby would be way more one-dimensional than it feels to me today. I'm gonna drop another old fogey comment, lol, I remember seeing/hearing a few remarks about how making and casting your own BJD was seen as a foolish newbie move, as if people dropping thousands on molds and air compressors were out here saying "I can't afford to buy a BJD, so I'll make my own!" So glad that the artist doll community has flourished, and that so many artists are out here finding the support and market for their work they deserve! That was a great thing to find now that i'm getting more active.

I think the isolation of the pandemic brought me closer to my dolls, they're not people but it feels more like company than an empty room to have them around so it made me feel less alone! My collection also really took off the last few years or so, I've found dolls I never imagined I would be able to bring home as tastes change and my old favorites become less and less high demand status symbols. I even brought home the first BJD sculpt I ever saw, the one who got me into the hobby! It's so nice to be back and connecting with people, though that's still a challenge for me lol. Here's to us returning folks, welcome back everybody!!

 

I just came back myself from an extended break. So sad to see so many companies I knew and loved gone; but a few are still around and some new places to discover too. Glad to see DOA is still here too

 

I took a year hiatus after my son was born. Wthin recent years I've fallen back into it really hard though.

 

I walked away from the dolls in 2017, for some reason I couldn't stand them, I guess that in the past I bought so many I didn't know what to do with them. I'm slowly getting back into being around them.

 

I started collecting in 2008, I think? I was very prolific in the hobby until I graduated from college in 2015 (I had scholarships, a job and was living at home so I had a lot of disposable income). Then I kind of dropped out, due to a combination of building health issues, lack of money, and also shifting interests. I came back to buy one doll in 2017 (I think?) because I happened to find her by accident and she was perfect for the main character for a story I was working on at the time, then I bought another doll in 2020 from a company whose dolls I admired for a long time, but I had no energy for doing anything with her so I left her bald and naked in her box.

Recently I've been recovering from the health issues and decided I needed more hobbies for my own mental health. So I came back to dolls, and I've been having a lot of fun re-discovering things like crafting (turns out, not a big fan of that anymore) and photography. Also while I was gone, all of the fashion doll people went ahead and started making incredible BJD shoes. I remember back in like 2012-ish, all shoes looked so clunky and doll-like... now you can get these perfect replica miniatures, down to the teeny little stitches.