Session 02 update log

What you told us May 1st.

Four primary feedback themes from your mockup-review meeting. Each one drove a strand of the work below.

Theme 1 — Decategorization of services

The original Mock 1 had services broken into separate cards (bridal, cosplay, theatrical, etc.). You felt that read as if we were sorting customers into boxes before they walked in — not the right register for a custom-work shop. Mock 2 rewrites the service framing as a single conversation about what gets built, with the customer-type emerging from their situation rather than from our taxonomy.

Theme 2 — Design direction (the Mock 2 marriage)

You wanted to keep the graphic-novel direction from Mock 1 but anchor it differently visually — less polished, more workshop-grade. We landed on a marriage of three elements: Direction-A graphic-novel grammar (panels, narration bars, illustrated cards) + Simplicity-pattern-book visual element-bank (paper tones, jewel-green accent, mid-century printed-pattern register) + Austin-vintage anchoring. The "we build cool shit" tagline stays verbatim; the rest is the visual register you're seeing on this page and across Mock 2.

Theme 3 — Bios in skills-and-interests voice, no titles

You ruled against role-titles on the team page. Bios should read in personality voice — what each person brings, what they care about, what they make — not as a resume listing. That call is held forward into Mock 2 and any future iterations.

Theme 4 — Funnel-target expansion (5 metros + cosplay-as-named-market)

You ratified a two-tier funnel (high-end custom + alterations; no middle), five geographic target metros (Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, Minneapolis, Austin), and naming cosplay/anime/pop-culture as a primary market. That decision shaped the entire Phase F research program below.

What we built in response.

Nine phases of work landed across May 5–10. The headlines:

Mock 2 itself

A complete visual rebuild applying the Direction-A + Simplicity + Austin-vintage register across all the site pages (home, process, portfolio, services, options, legal, design-options/photo-presentation). Mock 1 is preserved untouched as iteration-history anchor. You can compare the two side-by-side from the Overview page (Mockup A vs Mockup B in the navigation).

The Glossary

A curated 12-term reference page (Custom Work Vocabulary) introducing customers to the vocabulary HAE uses in conversations. Plus a comprehensive 116-entry reference document for your internal use when drafting client communications.

The Questionnaire

An interactive multi-step six-branch form that walks customers through service-type triage, build-vs-alterations branching, project-scope shaping, timeline expectations, tier-band comfort, and contact-channel preferences. Designed to do four jobs at once: (1) empower customers with the vocabulary they need, (2) triage leads before your consultation call, (3) shape expectations on timeline and cost, and (4) demonstrate to a customer that we can build things — the form itself is a capability-demonstration vs. the alternative of a Wix-template form.

Four research passes

Two weeks of structured market research covering all four customer segments HAE serves:

Pass A — Cosplay demand: commission economics, first-timer journey, convention-circuit demand at Dragon Con / Anime Expo / NY Comic Con, community-internal dynamics.
Pass B — Theatrical / production supply: six-class vendor taxonomy from premier studios to regional rentals, Garment District density, designer-mediated procurement patterns.
Pass C — Wedding-planner B2B: five-category market intelligence (planner / coordinator / venue-coordinator / day-of / floral-and-rentals), pay-to-play platform tier, luxury-bridal pricing-opacity norms, the "atelier" word's dual meaning.
Pass D — Recreational-luxury demand: five sub-buckets (wealthy private events / Texas Rose Festival families / Mardi Gras krewe royalty / Halloween-affluent / period-recreational), multi-generational legacy referral pattern, cost-as-status-display register, coronation-secrecy norms, geographic mismatch (research is Tyler-TX and New-Orleans heavy; not directly transferable to HAE 5-metro markets).

Permission letter templates

Four customer-facing letter templates for the four most common badge-permission situations: staged-at-venue (portfolio shots taken at a partner venue), work-for-IP-holder (commissioned cosplay / character work with nominative-fair-use posture), festival-participation (royalty-court or pageantry events with coronation-secrecy framing), and to-the-trade vendor-partnership (designer-mediated production work). Each comes in two versions: the internal-track has the working notes / disclaimer language / audit trail; the public-track is the version you can send.

Cross-cutting governance

A round of internal discipline updates that don't change what you see but make the process more robust going forward — better verification at session-close, better discovery of patterns across projects, better backup discipline before any canonical files get changed.

Your packet for Friday.

Eight deliverables ready for handoff at the meeting. The first six are the substantive content; the last two are companion narratives explaining how the work was built.

1–4. Four permission letter templates

Staged-at-venue · Work-for-IP-holder · Festival-participation · To-the-trade vendor-partnership. Public versions ready to fill-and-send; internal versions retained for reference.

5. Glossary v1 (116 entries, full reference)

Comprehensive vocabulary substrate organized by semantic cluster (customer & engagement / costume & construction / service-offering / occasion & event / industry & role). Source-of-truth for client conversations.

6. Questionnaire v1 (61 questions, 6 branches)

The interactive form — deployable to the live site or excerptable for in-person triage. Preview it here.

7. Market Intelligence brief

A Lindsey-actionable summary of the 5-metro × segment market matrix: per-metro recommendations, spend-tier patterns, the geographic-mismatch caveat for recreational-royalty, eight strategic implications for HAE positioning, and SEO + outreach decisions per metro per segment.

8. Research-pass narrative

Companion to the Market Intelligence brief, explaining how the research was built — what each pass set out to learn, what it found, how its findings have been applied to deliverables, and how the SEO strategy content can be applied going forward.

What's on the table Friday.

Suggested agenda items for our conversation — you can rearrange or skip any of them as the meeting unfolds.

Things to look at and react to

Mock 2 itself. Walk through the pages, compare against Mock 1 if useful, flag anything that doesn't read right.
The Glossary and Questionnaire. Customer-voice check — does this sound like things you'd say in conversation? Anything that reads off-register?
The four permission letters. Tone check on each variant. The IP-holder and festival-participation ones in particular have specific legal framing worth your read.
The Market Intelligence brief. Strategy alignment — does the SEO and outreach guidance match how you're thinking about the funnel?

Things we need your input on

Letterhead asset. If you have a Hook & Eye logo / letterhead you want on the permission letters, we'll swap it in. If not, the current letters use the typographic letterhead from the Mock 2 register.
The peacock-green hex. The Mock 2 jewel-green is currently #1c5d4d. If you want a different exact shade, we'll adjust the palette across all the deliverables.
The Mock 2 font catalog Phase C binding. The current Mock 2 register uses Source Sans 3 for body + Georgia for display. Final font-stack binding for production is a Lindsey-decision.
Phone number for the questionnaire. The form currently has a placeholder; we'll fill in the actual contact number you want customers to see.

Open items to discuss

Sam Thomas portfolio assets. The Mock 2 portfolio uses placeholder structure. Existing Sam Thomas photo assets need a quick audit-and-approve pass for which images go where.
Wix archeology. Quick inventory of any content / structure on the current Wix site that should make it into the new site.
Domain transfer status. Where are we on the Wix → Cloudflare path? Anything blocking?
Recreational-royalty positioning per metro. The market research surfaced a geographic mismatch: the recreational-royalty findings are Tyler-TX and New-Orleans-heavy, not directly transferable to your 5-metro funnel. Two paths forward (analogy-with-caveat vs per-metro Phase G research); worth your read in the Market Intelligence brief §5.

What's coming next.

Whatever you flag Friday becomes the input for Mock 3 / Session 03. The natural next iterations would be:

Mock 3. Whatever the Friday feedback shapes — usually a more polished refinement of Mock 2's register, plus any directional pivots if you want some.
Phase G follow-ups. Per-metro research where we currently have gaps (recreational-royalty institutional landscape, wedding-planner B2B per-metro identification, mid-luxury bridal $5K–$15K tier if that becomes interesting).
Live-site deployment. Once we settle the design and packet content, we move toward actual deployment — domain transfer completion, Wix → Cloudflare cutover, live-site availability.
Mock 1 → Mock 2 → Mock 3+ traceable progression. The pattern that this Session 02 update introduces — keeping each iteration visible as iteration-history rather than overwriting prior work — will continue across future sessions.