Hello /r/rawdenim, lets talk about theme weeks!

So, we've had a few so far and I think that everyone here kinda gets the idea: I beg people to post pictures from a specific brand. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I'm trying to have as little of an impact into the lives of the people I solicit, so I do try and give them a few days notice and sometimes we get a lot of posts and sometimes not. It's a function of how many people in the sub own a pair from a company and have talked about it in the past.

There are a few points that I do want to address as to my thoughts about some things that have been asked about the theme week concept:

1. Schedules - I do like the idea of scheduling brands out a few months so that if you wanted, you could plan a post for that theme week. Or remember to come by the sub more often that week if you were interested in that brand. However, I don't want the fact that we have a schedule to keep people from posting. We'd also have to come up with a fair way to pick a schedule. And getting people to agree about specifics like this is never easy.

2. Ownership - I would like to actually turn over the concept to the mods and have /u/RawDenimAutoMod be the one to post the theme week announcement. This will give the concept a little more legitimacy, and not have it be just some random dude (me) trying to get people to post pictures. I'm still willing to work on the back end though, with researching users with a pair from the brand for the next theme week and trying to solicit posts from them. So I wouldn't just be abandoning the project. Anyone else who wants to help should definitely let me know!

3. The possibility for guerilla advertising - Maybe I'm just being paranoid about having my fake reddit name dragged through the mud, but I see there being a possibility that some dastardly denim company, Company X, trying to buy their way onto the schedule and then hitting the sub with a bunch of basically targeted marketing with posts about their jeans. And this is another reason I want to move the concept owndership over to the mods. We are not a huge community, but almost 23k members is probably enough for fiendish Company X to have their intern spend an afternoon creating user accounts and pictures of product to target.

This is a drawback to the schedule I guess. Again, maybe I'm just being paranoid.

4. The possibility of not having any posts - So when I choose Ande Whall and Studio D'Artisan I knew we would see a fair amount of posts. I really wanted to see what would happen when we had a theme week for a very rare brand in these parts though, so I picked ALD for the next one. The Atelier LaDurance theme week only generated a single post, but it was from a user who I didn't solicit. There were two other people who said that they would try and get postings up, but life happens and they got busy. No big whoop. I do think its cool that we got an unsolicited post though, and it kind of validates the concept in my mind.

But, after a few theme weeks we will run into the problem of theme-ing brands that won't generate a lot of content. Do we still move forward when we have a week without any posts?

5. Raw Denim Library Project This is such a helpful tool for researching people to talk to. I'm just going to try and promote it as much as I can.

So yeah, I'm interested in seeing what everyone has to say about this.

EDIT

6. Theme Week Frequency - /u/minkusdominkus brought up this point that I completely forgot to add into this post. How frequent should the theme weeks be? After the first Ande Whall one, I waited a month before posting the Studio D'Artisan one (I think). And then waited three weeks before posting the Atelier LaDurance one. Would either be preferable? Would it be better to have the theme weeks be the last week of every month, for example?