Last year, before the pandemic struck, we created this schoolgirl costume for one of the Competition Jazz teams at Broadway Bound Dance Academy in Media, Pennsylvania. Lindsey, the instructor and choreographer for the team, wanted a schoolgirl costume design inspired by Slytherin House from the Harry Potter series.
We LOVE working with Broadway Bound. Their owner Donna Ranalli, has built an amazing studio that produces top notch dancers (check out their Client Story here!!). And we LOVE working with Lindsey! She always has a vision for costumes and knows precisely what she wants. And, as much as we adore this Harry Potter inspired costume, we can’t take credit for this design concept, which is the beauty of producing custom costumes: the client can always get exactly what they want! Didn’t it turn out SO cute?!
Given that we needed to stick to the colors for a specific Hogwarts house, we had a hard time finding the plaid to stick with the theme. Even working with many international and domestic fabric suppliers we are limited to what they produce. We knew we had sublimation – the process of printing a custom design on fabric – as a fallback, but sublimation can cause time delays and often adds to the price of the costume. And, as we all know, dance studios have strict schedules and budgets, so we kept looking and eventually found the perfect green plaid and were able to produce the cutest Slytherin schoolgirl costume you ever did see!
Unfortunately, due to the then unforeseen pandemic, dance competitions were among the first events forced to shut down, and many studios had their seasons cut short. Broadway Bound Dance Academy was one of those studios affected. Now that the country is opening back up Broadway Bound, like so many of our clients, have been able to get back to competing! Over the Summer/Fall of 2020 they added two new members to the team, so we had to create two more schoolgirl costumes. Fortunately, we had the patches and just enough fabric in stock to make them so that everyone could compete!
This season we made it our mission at D.A. Designs to do what we could to help all our clients and keep dancers doing what they do best, dancing! To do that we kept all prices the same, waived any and all re-order fees, as well as order minimums. Allowing any new dancers or dancers who needed a new size get what they needed easily and at the same price as the season before, regardless of increased material and shipping costs on our end. We offered this to all our clients. And, although historically we haven’t been set up to do standard alterations, we rearranged our workshop and staff to offer alterations for the first time ever! Letting us alter costumes for dancers that grew or for team members who switched costumes around within a group so that new costumes wouldn’t need to be purchased, helping them save money and keep dancing!
We’re so happy to see competitions starting back up, and we can’t wait to see what new designs we will create for Broadway Bound Dance Academy and all our clients in 2021!