I’ve had a tremendous response to the draw on Shoes.co.uk with over 250 people entering in less than a day. Good luck to everyone that entered – There is one prize per day finishing on the 10th February, well in time for Valentine’s Day!
Just hop across to our page on Facebook by clicking the banner above and like the page for automatic entry to win a pair of Butterfly Twists.
Another busy week on the way! We have finally integrated with Channel Advisor which means that our products are now viewable on some of the biggest price comparison engines, such as Nextag, Price Grabber, Shopzilla, and Google shopping. We were always on Google shopping but now the feed is listed by size which should help to increase our products’ visibility.
Graphics – The Christams graphics have been approved, so its just acase of uploading the final images and hotspotting to the various collections we have. We also have a bank of images that the affiliates can use on their websites, these are downloadable with embedded links from either Affiilaite Future or Linkshare.
Spring Summer Planning – Its been tough planning the Spring because Autumn has been so successful. But we’ve got to do it, well in we’ve done most of it, but when the website is trading at 100% on last year it makes it very difficult to be bold enough to think that that can continue! Anyway we have to get our heads around it this week and bulk up some of the buys where we can. We also have a few new brands where we have to plan the orders.
New Brands – Last week saw the launch of two new brands on Shoes.co.uk! Irregular Choice Shoes came in at the start of last week and have taken off like a bomb so we need to plan the repeats and have already bought a Spring range. The Winter range is a fabulous collection of party shoes and boots and many of them match the deatils on the Irregular Choice Bags that we already stock. So if you are looking for a Christmas present for loved one then take a look!
Friday – sees me driving off down to Lutterworth for a meeting of the Enterpreneurs Circle, this is a monthly event where like minded buisness owners can all get together and learn a thing or two from Nigel Botterill, the guy that set up the ‘The Best of’ franchise. Nigel is a pretty successful entrepreneur so its time well spent. Time working on my business intead of in my business.
I am sure that there will be many other things to contend with! we still haven’t got the Postcoder system working, so hope fully I can get that boxed off as well, and we have a lot of work to do on SEO, removing some rogue duplicate content that seems to have found its wasy into the code after we introduced the departmental structure in July!
Nigel
Shoes.co.uk just took delivery of the first styles from the new ben Sherman Collection. I’m pretty familiar with Ben Sherman Shoes having been involved with the original company PIL and Sherman Cooper Marketing back in the mid 90′s when the brand was first launched as a footwear label.
Back then I had just left Barratts to set up Network CFD and I had a call from Michael Pearce who had just acquired the Ben Sherman Shoes licence and taken it to a small company called PIL who at the time were distributing the Acupuncture range of shoes. I worked with Michael developing a range of Men’s shoes, firstly in my factory in Portuagal (The one I represented as an agent) and later Calz Olip in Cola in Northern Italy.
The ranges were a huge success especially the collection of Desert boots which I had made in a small stitchdown factory called Ilarj, (I think they still owe me money!) and a big range of Loafers which were made in Olip.
Fast forward a few years, our Italian prices were too high for them and the started making sub standard ranges in Eastern Europe, the SCM company got a new MD; Michael and them parted company and the ranges nosedived. (Why do people mess with a good formula!?)
The brand was licenced to Browning Enterprises, which was owned by Daniel Rubin (Who also ran Dune), and they tried to ressurrect the glory days, but when Daniel decided to step out of the supply game in 2008, the brand was once again up for grabs. This time it was taken by Lloyd shoes’ Director and erstwhile Base London partner, Mark Verona, under his Hudson Shoes umbrella. Mark has now developed a new collection of shoes and boots that in some way recapture the good old days when the brand used to sell!
The new collection includes a cracking range of Dsert Boots, new chunky brogues and modern stylish loafers. Shoes.co.uk has once again decided to stock the shoes on the strength of the new collection, (we wouldn’t buy it if the designs were not right), so after nearly 15 years my affiliation with Ben Sherman Shoes is once again ignited and the circle is kind of complete. I kind of miss those good old days of travelling to Italy to develop the ranges with Michael, he was one of a kind and the world needs eccentric individuals with vision like him! In our heyday we were making 300,000 pairs a year, imagine the potential if they could get the brand cooking again!
Irregular Choice Shoes are designed by Danny Sullivan a young shoe designer based in Brighton. He came up with the idea about 10 years ago and along with his father, Jim, now distibutes the brand from the Allied Shoe Company. Irregular Choice shoes and boots are really quirky! very different and bound to impress! See through heels, fold over top lines, amazing patterns and prints, and daring accessories make up teh Irregula Choice story!
There is also a cracking range of matching Irregular Choice handbags available as well and many of them match the range of shoes. take a look at a couple of examples below and click through to take a look!
Irregular Choice Shoes OZ £89.95
Irregular Choice Bags - No Place Like Home £39.95
All shoes and bags are available from Shoes.co.uk with Free Delivery and Free Exchanges. Delivery is in 48 hours and there is 24 hour delivery available as well.
A frustrating Monday! As if I hadn’t enough to do this week two essential technologies let me down! firstly my ‘Upstairs’ PC, the one I do all the work on at the weekend started making funny noises on Saturday and gave up the ghost completely by Sunday. Seems that the main fan in the computer, yes the one that keeps eveything cool, became clogged with dust and stuff and stopped rotating, result? an overheating PC – at least it had the decency to cut out before the motherboard got frazzled.
Cue early Monday trip to Grapevine Computer in Altrincham. Sure I could have called him over, but I know what he’s like, he’s a busy chap and would have had to close his shop to do so, so I did the best thing for both of us, he is 2 minutes away, so it was PC in the back of the car get to Altrincham by 10am. Rick immediately stopped what he was doing, opened up the PC, blew all the rubbish out of it and replaced the power pack inside. I was away by 10.30 and the computer was up and running 5 minutes later.
Was that great customer service?, well yes, but it shouldn’t have broken down in the 1st place, it was after all only 11 month’s old- but Rcik read the situation perfectly and did exactly what he should have done. Good man!
Next I dropped my iPhone on Sunday and found out Monday morning that it wouldn’t charge. I phomed 02 – seems that when I trnsferred my wife’s iPhone to my account, having created anew account I forgor to resinstate the insurance – Bring it on 02 – what’s the worst that can happen? Well how about a bill for £429 to replace the handset. I upgraded in June so there was no hope of renewing the contract early or getting a new handset out of them for anything less. “So are you saying that the best you can do is for me to pay you £429″ “Yes” – so that was it was it? well I spend about £100 a month on the phones so do you think that that was good service, no it was not, not at all, in fact they couldn’t care less.
I booked an appoinment at the Arndale in Manchester at 12.10 (The Trafford Centre wait was 5 days!) Gor to the Arndale at 11.45, giving me a chance to check out a few shoe shops! took my place in the queue. They were BRILLIANT! immediately get me settled, “Hello Nigel just wait a moment over there” , “what’s the problem” , “someone will be with you shortly”. OK I had to wait but like a fine restaurant they attended to me immediately and kept me up to date with the wait time.
After about 20 minutes (I was in awe of how busy the shop was!), I was in front of Adam, the tech guy who immediately apologised for the wait time and started to sort me out with a new hand set. He took a while because the systems in the shop were down, but the upside of that was he couldn’t take the obligatory £139 for the new phone- so guess what?, rather than pee me off after such a long wait he gave it to me! I was amazed but there you go, I was well impressed, and went about spending £35 in the shop on accessories, and I’ll be back there in a few weeks sorting myself out with an iPad for Christmas. I have to say that even apart from the unusual outcome their customer service was incredible.
Which leads me on to Experience Number 3!
I got back to the office, (after stopping at Sanam for some samosas!), and attepted to engage once again with Channel Advisor to try and get my feeds working on Shopzilla, Nextag,Pricegrabber and Google Base. This has been going on since November the 4th! Having sent a number emails to “the Techie guy” last Friday and hearing nothing back when I got back to the office I emailed him again. You see he has never put a phone number on any of his emails so I couldn’t ring him! amazing but true!
Eventually I received an email from him saying that he was too busy to call me but if I had any further technical problem I should contact the support team, a process that going via America could take days. Of course I was fuming and complained to him and the sales exec who sold me the service in the first place, and was then told by both of them that they had already told me they ecouldn’t call me, they didn’t have the time, the Sales guy did eventually, and received both barrels and a demand that the MD call me. I am told he will call me tomorrow.
Furthermore I checked the feeds that should have been working this evening and all the links from the two search engines that are running go to Shoes.co.uk’s home page, not the product pages. So Mr Whizz kid can’t even get those right, cue another email tonight to the MD demanding some attention.
There are a lot of companies out there touting for business, times ar hard and business is tough. Some are making it because they impress, some will come a cropper, no matter how good they think they are because they give shoddy service. Three examples all in one day – IT DOES NOT MATTER HOW BUSY YOU ARE – YOU CAN STILL IMPRESS! – in fact it is the perfect opportunity to show just how good you are! – food for thought isn’ t it?
