Hook and Eye Company — Project Understanding Brief 2

This is the same shape as the first brief: what I heard from you on May 1, written back so you can correct anything I misread. Brief 1 (04-17) introduced the project; Brief 2 documents what you said when you saw the first mockup in front of you, and how Mock 2 and the Phase I packet were shaped by that conversation. As before: easier to fix now than after we build against it.

The shape of the meeting

About ninety minutes on May 1, with Samantha joining mid-conversation. Mock 1 was live on the preview site and you walked through it. The recording was the source for everything below; where I quote you it's verbatim, where I summarize it's because the transcript had more words than the idea needed.

That set the floor for everything after — the content density is right; what we tuned were the visual register, the page structures, and the strategy on top of them.

The design direction — where we married

Brief 1 floated graphic-novel as one of four directions. Brief 2 documents the marriage. After we walked through Mock 1 and the other options slate, you described a direction that pulled three threads together:

• Graphic-novel grammar — the bones from Direction A. "We build cool shit," editorial panels, attitude paired with professionalism. You: "I love this. This is, I think, a really good splash page."
• Vintage Simplicity pattern-book element-bank — the fonts and the visual idiom of old sewing patterns. The marker-drawn block art style. You named the connection: "I really like the comic book thing, but these fonts are kind of the old fashioned fonts that used to be on pattern books. I think it would be really cool if we had this comic book vibe but use these fonts from these sewing sources."
• Austin-vintage anchor — not neon-sign Austin; embroidery, Cavender's-boots, fifties-burger-joints-turned-music-signs Austin. The kind of vintage that pairs with handcrafted tradition.

The marriage names itself: graphic-novel grammar built on a vintage Simplicity-pattern-book element bank, anchored in Austin-vintage handcrafted tradition. You pointed out it puts the atelier register back in play without losing the comic-book attitude — the maker carrying on an old handcrafted tradition into modern art and modern attitude.

Color: the jewel green the mockup auto-chose was close to the "peacock green" you use on the shop. You're going to send me the hex code. The cream paper-tone you said is "really nice" and we'll keep it as the base.

The font conversation

You were specific. The chunky body font on Mock 1 read as "too cartoonish" — your phrase, after I said it first as a candidate complaint. What you wanted instead:

• Smaller body, in a humanistic sans-serif. The hero subtitle font (the "couture · costume · custom build" tag line) was closer to right than the body text was.
• Title-and-body contrast preserved. The "Bodice for the Globe London" pattern in the portfolio carousel — serif-style title, sans-serif body — read better and is the pattern we'll apply.
• A font catalog from me, so you can pick rather than me guess. You'll send me a few of the pattern-book sources you like — Simplicity patterns, maybe a Queerity reprint. I'll lay them out alongside humanistic-sans candidates so you can react.

The portfolio strategy

Two decisions landed in one passage of the conversation. First, the cadence:

• Start with five to seven hand-picked projects. "That's not so much work when you're gathering all the [photos]."
• Add two or three per year going forward, end-of-year refresh.
• The starters bias toward what you actually want to make more of: mascots (you've done several), Texas Rose Festival pageantry, dancewear (footage of the spinning before/after exists), the masquerade piece for theater, the Lego work for corporate. Tiger-jacket behind-the-scenes shots are available.

Second, the visual layout: on each portfolio detail page, instead of metadata laid out in little blocks beside the photo, do a pattern-book card — vertical title and year set on the side of the photo, like an old Simplicity envelope. Not text over the photo, but the information itself arranged with the visual restraint of the source idiom. Your phrase: "poetry, visual poetry."

One companion decision: a Friday "art-day" where the whole team brings computers, scoops photos together, and talks through projects on transcript. The transcript-spin will populate the schema for each project so nobody is writing portfolio copy from scratch. "I've been trying to herd these cats for three years." The transcript-spin is meant to make it one Friday, not three years.

The team page direction

You ruled out the thing the v2 draft was trying to do (individual grad-school bios with titles). What you wanted instead:

• No titles. Unified-group framing. Your reason was operational, not theatrical: titles led customers to ask for specific people who often weren't the right person for the project; the unified framing lets you swap who's on a job without breaking the customer relationship.
• Bios in skills-and-interests voice, not resume voice. A little attitude. Real people, recognizably professional. You gave examples from inside the team: you'd talk about painting and crafting; Callie about wedding dresses and miniatures; Sam's bio guessed-itself when the AI saw the room. Each person gets the kind of intro that says "I love working on these specific things" rather than "I am the senior X with Y years of Z."
• Editorial-style headshots. A little weird, a little abstract, a little magazine. Not matched, but coordinated. The graphic-novel framing makes "everybody's superhero persona" an honest analog — not anime, just artistic rendering. Emma might prefer an illustrated portrait instead of a photo (Court can draw it). Whatever the mix, the page reads as this team, not as a roster of people.

Services and process — re-shaping

This was the second major reorientation of the meeting. The Mock 1 services section had four named categories (specialty fabrication, pattern drafting, draping and tailoring, alterations and seamstress). You said:

The reasoning was grounded — you'd just spent time re-reading hundreds of inbound emails and the most common opener was "I'm not sure if you do this, but…" The heavy categorization was making people self-disqualify before they'd ever spoken to you. The fix you proposed:

• Lead the page with process, not categories. The process is identical whether someone is having pants hemmed or commissioning a full custom build: come in → measurements → fitting → build → hand-off. Same shop, same flow, different scope.
• Frame alterations as care-for-quality-things. The garments you alter usually start with more features than a $20 dress — so you're working with materials that reward care. That ties alterations to the same handmade-craft thread the rest of the site is on, instead of demoting them to a sideline.
• Acknowledge the AI moment honestly. With AI in everything, people are reaching for the human-connection signals — handmade, in-person, made for this body. The page can lean into that without making it a slogan.
• Keep category words for search, just not as headline content. Samantha's point: we still want the right words ("we do weddings," "alterations," etc.) findable for SEO; they belong in body copy and photo metadata, not as the structural skeleton of the page.

Funnel strategy — the shape of who we want

You named the two-tier funnel before the meeting and ratified it during: high-end full custom + alterations, no middle. The middle is where the $400 inquiries land, and they cost you money to politely decline.

What we'd reach for on top of that funnel:

• High-end customers — vintage-clothing people, quality-suit-and-dress people, the kind of customer who buys a piece intending to keep and adjust it for years. Lindsey's phrase from Samantha's voice: "You wouldn't buy a $20 dress and pay $250 to hem it." The high-end alteration story is the same care-for-quality-things story the process page tells.
• Cosplay / anime / pop-culture commissioners — a named segment, especially at the higher-end show-build tier (not the $400 first-timer tier). Worbla armor, foam shoulders, Comic Con builds.
• Theater, film, and recreational-royalty production — Texas Rose Festival, masquerade-ball clients, the production-side designers who already know your work via Samantha.
• Geographic targeting at five metros: Atlanta, LA, New York, Minneapolis, Austin. Atlanta and LA and NY have evidenced cosplay convention anchors; NY has the production density; Minneapolis and Austin are home markets with thinner research evidence but real demand.

The questionnaire we built does the expectation-shaping work — it answers "what does it take to build a thing like this" before the consultation call, so the people who reach you have already self-qualified on scope and budget. You called it "kind of an interesting idea" when I described it; it lives in the Phase I packet now.

Partner badges & legal

You ratified the careful framing here. Two things:

• Badge language is "work staged at," not "official partner of." AMC, Texas Rose Festival, Lego — you've done work that was used in those contexts. The website can say that. What it can't say (without a written agreement) is that you are an official partner or supplier of those institutions. The distinction is legal and social; the safer phrasing reads as proud rather than overreaching.
• Permission / intent letters drafted. Four variants are in the Phase I packet (festival-participation, staged-at-venue, trade/vendor partnership, work-for-IP-holder). You can send the ones that fit, and if a recipient pushes back you have a paper trail. Most won't respond, which is the expected outcome — silence is good news here.
• Privacy policy and terms. AI-drafted research material is in the questions-and-to-do thread. The measurement-and-photo language you flagged in Brief 1 is in there. When you're ready, LegalZoom or an attorney can polish a clean reasoned draft rather than a template.

What we've built since May 1

The packet you'll see at session 02:

• Mock 2 redesign — applies the design-direction marriage above. Pattern-book-card portfolio detail layout. Jewel-green accent, cream paper-tone. No-titles team framing applied. Process-first services framing applied. Hero photo restored (the elvis-jacket photo from Mock 1; Mock 2 originally had substituted an SVG illustration during a build pass — Brief 2 documents the restore).
• Comprehensive Glossary — 110+ entries across five semantic clusters (customer & engagement, costume & construction, service & commercial, occasion & event, industry & role). Standalone reference page at /reference/glossary/. Designed to be excerptable into emails, proposals, and consultations.
• Market Intelligence brief — five-metro × four-segment matrix of where the research found evidence, where it didn't, and what to do (and not do) per cell. Includes the geographic-mismatch caveat: Texas Rose Festival and Mardi Gras institutional findings are documented for Tyler TX and New Orleans LA, neither of which is in your five-metro funnel. Anti-extrapolation rule held throughout.
• Research-pass Narrative — companion to the Market Intelligence brief, documents how each of the four research passes was built and what it produced, so you can trace any claim in the deliverables back to a corpus source.
• Questionnaire — six branches (cosplay, theatrical/production, wedding-bride, wedding-planner B2B, recreational-luxury, alterations) plus a universal entry block. Expectation-shaping for the people who don't yet know what kind of project they're asking about.
• Phase G permission letters — four variants in both internal and public versions.

What's still on the list (features for later)

Same shape as Brief 1 carried it: these are exciting but not session-02 urgent.

• Wedding silhouette selector — still Callie's expertise, still a phase-two or phase-three feature. The Glossary entry for silhouette carries the deferred note.
• Inspiration-photo upload portal — pairs with the privacy-policy language.
• Backend integrations — scheduler-to-Google-Calendar, payment-receipts-to-Sheets, text notifications on booking. All possible, none urgent.
• Font catalog — I'll bring a slate of humanistic-sans + Simplicity-pattern-book candidates to a future session. You'll send me a few pattern sources you like and we'll calibrate from there.
• Hex code for the shop's peacock green — you'll send. I'll swap it into the jewel-green accent slot.

What I'd love you to correct

Before Wednesday at 11:00, if any of the above misreads you, please flag it. The places where I'd most expect to be a step off are:

• The design-direction marriage framing — I labeled what we landed on as graphic-novel + Simplicity-pattern-book + Austin-vintage. If that combination overshoots one of the three, the others should compensate; if it undershoots, we'll add a fourth thread.
• The process-over-categories reshape — if the right answer is more like "keep some categories but lead with process," let me know and I'll restructure rather than rebuild.
• The two-tier funnel + five-metro geography — if Minneapolis or Austin should swap out for a different metro, or if a metro's segment focus should shift, easier to correct here than after SEO copy ships.
• The team-page voice — I sketched the bios-in-skills-and-interests register based on your phrasing. If the tone-target is meaningfully different from what I described, it's worth catching before we draft.
• The art-day cadence — I'm assuming we schedule one Friday for the team-portfolio gather rather than spinning it across weeks. If that's wrong for the shop's actual rhythm, say so.

If it all reads right, no reply is needed — we'll work from it on Wednesday.