Have you gottten friends/family into the hobby?

I've been working on one of my friends from graduate school, hehe. I show her everything I get and she loves it, and there's a doll she had her eyes on (an MSD one from gemdoll I think? I need to poke her again about the sculpt). Eventually, my cute photos will wear her down.

 

I did with my sister, but she is a bit picky about what doll she wants. So at the moment, she is like me, just shopping around and seeing which doll speaks to her.

 

My sister is the one who got me into liking dolls in general with her blind box dolls, but I'm the one who took the plunge and bought a resin bjd. I guess that convinced her because she also went out and bought a doll from the same company (in a bigger size!) not long after. Now we're both in the hobby and totally enable each other (though admittedly I do more of the enabling)

 

I guess so? I did give someone I knew a doll of mine once when she was about middle school age, and I believe she went on to enjoy the hobby to some extent. We're not in touch so I don't really know.
I have tried to share my interests with some people close to me but I've always been low income and my friends have been, so it's not necessarily something easily appealing unless you just have a huge personal draw to it. I had some friends interested in my dolls but not interested enough to buy something for themselves.
I think at this point I'm most comfortable just fumbling about any of my hobby stuff on my own as I'm so used to it. I don't really try to recruit anyone.

 

Oh! Reading this just reminded me that I once gave an unwanted doll head to a friend of mine when I was in high school! I don't think she ever did much with it, and she never got any more dolls, but she did create a character for it that she still uses in her stories and artwork to this day. And she kept the name I had given him

 

Uh no. Quite the opposite. My family all hate my dolls. I think my mom is most open to the idea of me collecting them though. She used to have a doll but my sister lost it or something.

I have met a lot of new people through the hobby though. It's also encouraged me to leave the house more and meet people at conventions.

 

Yes! I got my best friend into and now my fiance wants to be the doll husband and have his own too. I’m over the moon hehe

 

I have friends in adjacent hobbies such as figurine collecting and playline fashion doll collecting, but none of them are interested in BJDs.
The customisable aspect and larger scale of BJDs is what interests me, but most of my friends seem interested in having shelf-size collectables that need no maintenance or customisation out of the box.

 

I'm generally open about my doll interests with my friends. Some of them think they're cool but are put off by the cost and effort, but these friends collect off-topic dolls and toys, and most of the others collect other plastic trinkets so they "get it" I convinced one friend (with no prior interest in dolls!) to be an assistant when I wanted to do outdoor shooting in a public area with lots of traffic. After that she asked me a lot more questions about the hobby. I think they could be convinced with enough peer pressure but it's a matter of getting them to fall in love with a particular doll first.

 

I've gotten a couple of friends interested, but only one of them got really into. I convinced them to do a doll of one of their OC's, and now they have multiple dolls (they even made one of my OCs into a doll for themself, and I'm absolutely in love with it)! I also got them into customizing. They do some amazing faceups and wigs. They also ended up getting into blind box dolls, and got me interested in those. Now we totally enable each other with these things lol.

 

Yep. I had discovered BJDs and showed them to my best friend. We then decided to order our first dolls together, as we were turning them into our OCs. Afterward, down the line, three of our friends got into them as well, and we had our little group. Sadly, I am now the only active one, but everyone still has their dolls.

 

I am this close to getting my cousin into BJDs. She's a big crafter who hyperfixates on different crafts at different times, and she's done everything from sewing and fibre crafts to jewellery making (wire-wrap and resin-casting) and painting. Dolls would be a perfect "umbrella" hobby for all her crafting. Only reason she's not already into them, is that her house is overflowing with a lifetime's worth on crafting materials, and she doesn't want to make her husband mad with Yet Another Crafty Hobby that Takes Up Space and Money. So she tells me that she's banned herself from buying one and I'm not allowed to enable her, don't even try But she loves my crew and follows my doll Instagram, and when we went travelling together and I brought a BJD along, she had a ton of fun taking pics of me taking pics of my doll.

As for friends, they're all supportive of my hobby but none of them seem interested in getting involved themselves, not even asking me about how to buy one.