Hi All,

Grumble grumble. It looks like I’m going to have to put up the prices of custom videos. Against my will- I set the prices according to what’s cost-effective for us to shoot. But I had reckoned without the stiff penalty than all vaguely adult-related business have to pay to process payments.

The only stable ways of accepting payments for the videos are by bank transfer (great, but not always possible; there can be some charges especially for international payments but generally it is reliable and low-cost) or by putting the finished video up on Elegance Studios shopping cart temporarily so you can pay and download that way. Which is fine, but we only get a 70% payout.

Which means that in order to actually get the 100 pounds or 200 dollars we’ve priced everything up at, we’ll need to charge 150 pounds or 300 dollars 🙁

Anyone who has already agreed a custom video with us- we’ll honour the price we quoted you, of course. If we have to accept payment via the shopping cart, we’ll take the hit.

But in order for shooting custom videos to be sustainable, we’re going to have to put the prices up to cover these charges.

What annoys me is that if we were selling custom made pincushions, there are any number of payment processing options we could use with very small commissions. We’re honest and upstanding producers, we’ve been in business more than a decade, pay our taxes, and have a large pool of generally satisfied customers and repeat purchasers. But our business is regarded as “high risk”.

I’m sorry we are going to have to increase the prices because of the stigma associated with being “adult”. It doesn’t seem fair.

Hywel

Hi Everyone!

Our house move went well, finally! It was well worth the wait (and worth the dings and dents the over-enthusiastic removal guys put into the plaster on the stairs) as we now have a splendid Georgian mansion to play in!

Well, it isn’t really a mansion, but owing the bizarrely distorted nature of property prices in this country, even though it cost LESS than the house we moved from, it has almost twice the floor area… including some pretty interesting spaces for shooting in. A mini-mansion, maybe?

Apologies if you’ve been waiting for email replied from me. We only got broadband a few days ago. I’ve been keeping up with the most urgent customer service emails on my phone, but people needing long answers please bear with me- I’ve got a backlog of 50 flagged emails each of which probably need 30+ minutes to compose a reply. I promise I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!

I can’t tell you how exciting it is to have a new home for ourselves and for the site. Although Ariel has a go on her blog.
It is in a quieter bit of the country so we may be able to shoot outdoors more- we might even be able to use our back garden if we plant a few more things to block the view from the canal towpath.

The old house was nice- big for the price in the area we were in, but the rooms didn’t have all that much personality. Not something that can be said of the new place.

We’re looking forward to our first run of shoots in July with some of RE’s fave models, but we couldn’t resist doing our first shoot already… we had a long custom video shoot from a member who had not only asked us to produce a 30+ minute epic, but had kindly paid for a custom fitted pony-girl harness and lots of other interesting bondage gear for Ariel to wear, including blackout contact lenses (much more effective than a blindfold, according to Ariel).

We shot the film with the help of our new kinky neighbour, Michael Stamp from Bars and Stripes– they bought a house nearby after learning that we were moving to the area, and because theirs wasn’t quite such a crazy place, they actually moved a few weeks before we did.

Anyway, the video is nearly ready, and it turned out to be almost an hour long, so we’ve decided it will be the first Elegance Studios video from the new house. Watch this space… and here are a few teaser stills to give you an idea what we’ve been up to!

Cheers, Hywel