Tomorrow (August 20^th, the same day as Sylvester McCoy’s and Sophie Aldred’s birthday) our Facebook page will be one year old! Yes it’s official we’ve been posting your pictures for a whole year.

In this, actually quite short, space of time we think we’ve done OK for ourselves. We’ve gone from having 0 followers to over 27,000 on Facebook, we’ve set up our own dedicated cosplay forum which now has over 200 members, built our own website which receives a steady stream of hits, launched our own Tumblr and we’re still keeping our Twitter active as well. Not bad for a small team!

When the page was first set up we posted, what was for all intents and purposes our, a mission statement. It ended with the phrase:

• It’s not about likes, it’s about sharing great cosplay
• It’s not about promo for promo, it’s about sharing great cosplay
• It’s not about the page, it’s about sharing great cosplay
• It’s all about all of you 🙂

Now a year on our mantra is still the same. We want to make sure we keep sharing your pictures and to be a safe and inclusive community, we’ve even increased the frequency with which we post to enable us to keep up.

The intention has always been for the DWC page to be for everyone. If people submit a cosplay to us we’ll post it, with no bias towards more well-known faces. The vision has always been to create an environment where people are comfortable to share their efforts with us.

The cosplay spotlight and the other picture articles we do on our website all follow that ideal, we offer people the opportunity to contribute and they can if they want to. It does not and should not matter as to the perceived quality or a person’s outfit or photo; cosplay is for everyone at the end of the day and we want everyone to be able to share in it.

What we really want is your feedback! How have we done in the last 12 months? The more feedback we get the better the page will become. We see ourselves as your community; you tell us what you’d like to see. Email us at DWCosplayers@gmail.com

What we hope do with the monthly profile picture is to have more themed months while at the same time making it as open to as many people as possible.

We also want to make more out of our website. We want to share more tutorials, engage with more cosplayers and have them share their stories and generally be more interactive, which brings us neatly onto our forum. In order to engage more people we’ll be sharing a topic from the forum on our Facebook page so followers can see what we’re talking about, please sign up and get involved.

We hope to see what we’ve built continue to grow over the next twelve months (and beyond) and hope that even more cosplayers engage with us and share their creations. We’d love to be able to post a new cosplay article each week on our website, and as long as we get enough content we’ll aim to do it.

Thank you all for your support over the past year!

Happy cosplaying!

Cover photo: Susan Foreman by Gwendolyn Billings, the first picture article we did.