I am confused about the choice of winners. Since I have been submitting designs I have seen several designs on the voting page moved to the products for sale. These designs were not listed in the voting pages for very long, and were not the highest rated. I thought that the highest rated designs were the ones to be chosen for actual production, and that the process of voting was supposed to take about a month. Are the owners just choosing what they like without regard to the votes? Is there something in the process that I have missed?

Good question.
It is an automated process as to how long the window for voting is. Typically 30 days. Unless there are good reasons to over ride this process (which none yet) that is normal.
As for the selection, it is based on the following factors:
- Prefilter (this is going to really be enforced) The Bagstab Team receives the pending submissions and decide if it is going to work on bags and appropriate for the community based on the decline codes.
- Member votes. The average rating score from the votes.
- Member comments. Although not many people use this but it helps the team get the sense of the acceptance of the design.
- Team votes. After the member voting period, the Bagstab Team then looks at all those designs and see if we would like it so much that we’d buy them ourselves. Sometimes these may not be the top scores as you may know that sometimes friends and family votes can skew the voting process wrongly but not often.

You see, Bagstab is about getting away from the mainstream of bag designs and use art to be unique. Good art is almost always universally accepted. The challenge to Bagstab is using the art space to Design For the Bag so in the end the appreciation is for the whole bag - art and physical bag design.

What you have explained here is what I thought was going to happen, but it does not answer my question about designs that I have seen appear in the voting pages for less than a week and then suddenly they are for sale when they were not highly rated.

Do you recall which design that is? As far as I know there hasn’t been any over riding of the process.

The Green Light on Tote Bag is one, Hel Vetica is Everywhere slingbag, The Red Horse Messenger bag, I think that the Dogwood bag was one, also. I think there were some others, but I am not as sure of them. I saw these on the voting pages after I began submitting a few weeks ago. Now they are for sale. Thanks for trying to figure this out with me.

hjoybanks - 26 May 2009 06:57 AM

The Green Light on Tote Bag is one, Hel Vetica is Everywhere slingbag, The Red Horse Messenger bag, I think that the Dogwood bag was one, also. I think there were some others, but I am not as sure of them. I saw these on the voting pages after I began submitting a few weeks ago. Now they are for sale. Thanks for trying to figure this out with me.

I recognize these submissions and none of them were overridden. Here are the dates:
Design - date submitted - date expired
The Green Light -  4/7/09 - 5/6/09
Helvetica - 10/23/08 - 12/23/08 (the site was down for upgrades which was why there was a delay in expiration)
The Red Horse - 4/2/09 - 5/1/09
Dogwood - 2/27/09 - 3/26/09

Maybe there was a database refresh error but all votes and comments on these ended before the expiration dates.
Let me know if you see such again.
Thanks

OK, but that’s a lot of senior moments, even for me