Tell me about completely rehauling your collection

I've come to that point in the hobby where I want to concentrate on expanding my doll's styles and characters rather then trying to amass an army. I see now that I should've done that when first starting out in the hobby, but I learn best the hard way. >_<

Now I'm in the process of re-shelling and re-homing some of my crew.

 

I've done it twice.

The first time, I decided to upgrade all of my MSDs to SD. That wasn't emotional at all because I was keeping the characters, just reshelling.

The second time was a little harder. So much of my RP had died off after years of development that I had trouble moving the characters on or staying attached. Gradually, I let them go one by one. The current crew revolves around the teenage son of my very first doll. It's like working with a new generation! So there is a connection to the old group but it's an entirely new group with new characters and stories. In my RP I do still mention or play some of the old group as side characters, but they are no longer in Doll form. I do sometimes miss some of them but not enough to try to shell them again. I still have my very first ever doll, but he is 'retired' from the group and stays stores away from them in my closet.

 

Oh dear, I have been there!
I don't remember what my first rehauling was caused by, but I do remember that I wanted to try something new. It didn't have anything to do with getting bored with my dolls or the hobby itself. I didn't go away from my style preference either, but I did swtich completely to a different brand. It was a very refreshing experience which also allowed me to check for myself what exactly I want from this hobby. As of today, I have gone through two or three major rehauls and I am now at a point where I know exactly what I want. It was a learning, try this or that, kind of experience.

 

My complete overhaul was caused by the fact that I realised that I had essentially bought mself in a corner. I had gorgeous dolls don't get me wrong but they were characters that were mostly created new and I had no emotional attachment to them beyond "oh hey pretty". My decision to do the switch was made when I figured out two years ago that it is possible to get all the complicated character outfits I had long since dreamed of and always deemed impossible. So I sold of most of my dolls as well as the collection of limited clothes I had amassed and concentrated solely on high fantasy MSDs from there on and finally shelling the characters I am truly attached to.

I now know exactly what I want my dolls to look - and how to achieve it! I can say I never regretted my decision but instead always say that it was the best thing I could have done.

 

I guess I could say I have rehauled more than half of my dolls. Not all at once but in last couple years, my doll crew is different from when I started out. I sold off lots of what I had when I started out and replaced majority of them with different ones. I am in process of another rehaul, reshelling few of them for different dolls and adding few more. But if I were to compare my doll family pictures, I can see that my dolls changed. It's natural to change them or get bored of them eventually. It's all part of the hobby. The only dolls I kept from the first was 4 of them out of 20, even tho one of them changed character. ^_^

 

Yep, but then again my doll collection has never been very large so at that time my rehaul consisted of selling just three dolls - which were all the dolls I owned at the time. Easy peasy.

I started buying bjds when I was still in college. It was therefore, of course, very difficult to afford on my budget and to add to that I was continually unsatisfied with my faceups (yet I still had this insistent feeling that I wanted my dolls to wear only faceups I'd done myself). I found I liked the idea of doll collecting, admiring other people's much better put together dolls, and window shopping for dolls and doll stuff I couldn't afford, much more than I actually liked the dolls I owned.

Plus, bjds have never been my sole hobby. At a certain point I was just like, meh, I'd rather have the money for anime figures instead, and sold the lot.

When I returned to buying dolls, it was because I had browsed DoA on a whim and happened across none other than my grail doll. At this point it was six or seven years from the point when I got my first doll, and I was at a different stage in life. I had a decent job now, I wouldn't have to stress out about the cost of the dolls as much as I did when I was a student and my only income was a part time work-study gig. I had also improved my art skills some, and felt more confident about being able to give faceups another go.

I don't miss the dolls I used to own, but I also think that my dissatisfaction with them was not the fault of the sculpts so much as my half-assed approach to doll collecting and my insecurities about them, both financial and artistic, and moreover my probably unrealistic/romanticized expectations of what I wanted the dolls to be. I wanted to magically have dolls as impressive as the dolls I had admired online, yet I didn't want to spend a lot of money OR time (and frankly, while you can compensate the lack of one with a surplus of the other the bottom line is you must expect to invest a lot of at least ONE of those two resources in this hobby).

Likewise, although I stand by my choices in sculpt and think my taste has become ever more particular over time, I credit my current more or less satisfaction with my collection less to the dolls than to my more mature perspective on them and my improved situation in life, which combines to just make it so that I'm not stressed about them and I don't have these big expectations that they're not filling.

I actually kind of bought back one of the sculpts I used to own in my first try collection - I used to have a F-16, and now I have a Lucas and a Masha which are almost like F-16. (It is fortunate for me that I still like these classic sculpts so much, because they seem to have fallen out of fashion and so I was able to pick them up at pretty amazing prices.)

 

I sold (almost) my entire collection a few years after I got into the hobby. Up until that point I had been a bit of a cheapskate with my dolls' accessories, so their eyes, clothes, etc were not very high quality because I couldn't rationalize the price of higher quality items. Eventually I caved and bought an expensive outfit (I still remember it was $140) and was absolutely amazed at how intricate it was, and how nice the fabric. Then I bought my first pair of urethane eyes and just couldn't go back to $10 glass eyes. After I decided it was worth paying for high quality stuff, I realized I wouldn't be satisfied until all of my dolls got upgraded to my new standard. But I had, I think, six dolls by then, and just the thought of replacing all of their stuff was exhausting. Not only that, but my tastes had changed slightly, and I was naming my dolls after 72 demons from a grimoire which, of course, opened up the possibility of me wanting all 72 which was terrifying. So I sold all the dolls except one head, probably 90% of my clothes and eyes, and maybe half my wigs. Honestly, it felt great.

After that, I started a new collection and these dolls' characters were in a whole other setting- a ghost story. I decided to go a more period/historical route, which somewhat became my undoing. >_> I never decided on an exact time period, but for some reason I was extremely picky about what looked "right" on these dolls. Some of them were impossible for me to get right, so I kept buying them things but never felt satisfied with them. And others, I would find the perfect outfits, but then they felt "finished" and I never touched them anymore. It was all a bit frustrating, and eventually I saw a new sculpt that reminded me of one of my demon characters from the first collection. I decided it would be fun to try again with the demons... and it WAS fun, way more fun than I was having with the "ghost story" dolls. After accumulating more demon dolls than ghost story dolls... and realizing that I just couldn't enjoy the ghost story dolls to the same degree, I recently decided to scrap them. I only sold half of them, though, because even though I was done with that story, some of my favorite sculpts of all time were in there! So I'm recycling those and they'll get new characters. I was both excited and sad to do this because I did like the ghost story and I did like the dolls, but, they were too frustrating. However, now that they're all either sold, put away in boxes, or done up as a new character... I don't really miss them. So it was a good decision.

It's a hard call to make and definitely requires some thought. But I've never regretted it!

 

I am curious to people in this thread: how long did it take to sell off all your dolls, and at what point did you start buying the new collection?

 

I try to go by one in, one rule, but that doesn't always work because I'm impatient and usually purchase on layaway anyway.