Wow, it feels like a huge achievement. My little website that I launched to help pay for fun bondage photoshoots is 21 years old today.
No, it’s not an April Fool’s joke!
I wouldn’t have chosen April 1st as a launch date – in fact the site was supposed to launch on April 4th. But when I checked how the site set-up was doing, from next to the swimming pool in a Los Angeles motel whilst waiting for Stacy Burke to arrive for what would have been something like my tenth photoshoot, I discovered not only had the site and the billing gone live, but the site already had its first member. So 1st April 2001 it was, a few days early.
I’d spin you a long tale about the adventures we’ve had in those years, from hobby to hobby-covering-costs to second job to making more money than being a physicist to making TWICE as much money as being a physicist. Quitting my academic career and going full-time. Getting a photo studio. Getting rid of the photo studio at the very earliest opportunity. Finding a new partner, running the business together. The friends and colleagues made along the way, location trips and bondage and spanking and BDSM and bastinado and all manner of kinky good things. Government crack-downs, billing company woes, PayPal blocking my business account, ATVOD, credit card company rules, the rise of social media… it’s been quite a ride and it shows no signs of stopping yet.
But I don’t have time to go in to all of that, because I’m backing up everything we shot on a two-day shoot with Lauren Louise and I’m getting ready for a marathon cosplay D&D BDSM shoot next week which I’m SUPER EXCITED about because Zoe posted one of her character/costume creations on Twitter last night and it looks bloody awesome.
So I’ll leave you to look through today’s bumper crop of archives which tell a bit of the story of Restrained Elegance. If you’ve missed out on any of our updates from the last few years, I’m running a 50% off sale on our eStore this weekend only. I’ll run a discount on the Classic store for older sets later on this month.
Thank you all for your help and support and enthusiasm. You’ve made all of this possible, and your continued support is what lets us tie up hot girls and film them for you for a living to this day!
Hywel
Just saying hi and congratulate you on your decades-long journey to happiness and fulfilment, and paychecks. As a fellow former physicist I feel the need to remind you that physics is not about how much you make – it’s about why the damn magnetic moment of the muon seems to be not quite right, it’s about whether we need to fix the W boson’s mass for good, and this whole dark matter topic is totally off the scale (and did not even exist when I was at university). Schrödinger’s cat still has issues. Don’t get me started on those new supa-cool meta materials for making things invisible, things which we actually should just take away and do without, in the first place. Much easier.
Well – physics we can do without. Restrained Elegance we should not and cannot do without. Never.
Cheers,
Stefan.
Wow,
I confess to feeling slightly old(er) reading this but congratulations to Hywel / Team and of course long-term members.
So much has changed in 21 years and the pace of change only seems to increase but I reckon an RE Member from 21 years ago would still approve of RE today.
Happy Birthday!