When I decided to embark on the Lindsay Interiors road I did sort of know that to run your own business you need to be a pretty good Jack of all trades and indeed my tasks have so far included being a writer, buyer, designer, bookkeeper, accountant, IT technician, warehouse person, administrator, post office clerk, customer service representative and so the list goes on.  I do love all these different aspects, keeps it interesting,  but there are some areas that I don’t like or enjoy and that’s marketing.  I know I can pay someone to do it but all of Lindsay Interiors income goes towards more gorgeous products for customers to drool over so however much I dislike something I just need to knuckle down and do it.

So I did.  My lovely partner already artfully arranges and sends out our monthly newsletters but we had yet to write or send a press release so I decided this was the next best place to start and never a better time with Father’s Day coming up.  But where to start…….I spent some time researching press releases, who to send them to, how and what the content should be, wrote a quick draft, added some pics and hey presto, off it went on Sunday evening.

Two days later only 12% of the recipients have opened the email so far but we’re not discouraged (even after receiving a rather rude msg from someone telling us to go away).  We know this takes perseverance and I am quite good at being persistent but it just reiterates that you have to be consistent and to plough through everything on a regular basis.  I should be keeping a dated to do list showing what activity needs to take place when on the marketing front otherwise before you know it it’s been 3 months since the last communication.

You never know, one of these editors may one day get sick and tired of seeing these mailings from Lindsay Interiors and so they will open one only to discover they love what they see

The up……..I was sitting in a café drinking my morning coffee, leafing through the Daily Mail and came across a small advert for an item that we stock, when I looked at the name of the shop selling this item I was delighted (and somewhat shocked) to find our web address listed next to it, albeit spelt incorrectly .   This of course sparked a raft of visitors to our website and even better, some orders.  I have now become obsessed with trawling the Daily Mail each day to see if they have found any other products they like from our little boutique….

The down……..the very next morning, a friend dropped our Daughter back from a sleepover and we had a chat at the door as you do about everything under the sun and Istarted telling her about Lindsay Interiors, at this point she announced that a mutual friend was doing the same thing, i.e., had started up a business selling interior accessories and told me the name of her website.  I was a little speechless at this, back in September I had hired this mutual friend to take photos of our children as a gift for someone, at that point she was doing photography for a living, but I do remember her asking me lots and lots of questions about Lindsay Interiors (we were due to launch 2 weeks later).  I took this for interest, silly me!

Over the next few hours I steadily grew angrier and angrier at this, I took a look at her website and saw that she was selling a few of the same items as me but overall did not have a lot of products on the site – perhaps 15 in total….  I checked Facebook and found a business page in her company name.  I can see from this that she set up her new venture approx 2 months after we launched but she has not updated anything since January so I do wonder if it were a 3 month wonder and she’s moved on to the next thing already.

Now I know I don’t have the monopoly on selling interior accessories online, far from it and after sitting down and really thinking about what made me so angry about all this, it’s not jealousy.  It’s also not the thought of competition on my doorstop (I don’t view it as such), it’s that she did this so sneakily without ever mentioning it to me.  She pumped me for information which I took to be interest where instead she was planning her own operation.  It made me sad to think that people operate in that fashion, I guess I always tend to give people the benefit of doubt, but once they’ve proved their real character I will cast them aside and move on.   

Onwards and upwards say I

I  often have a little debate going on in my head,  should I do more proactive brand awareness activities or should I wait until our one year anniversary has passed so I have a good baseline.  There are pros and cons to both and so far I have tended to err on the side of “let’s wait until after a year has passed”, probably because I have more than enough to get on with without adding a whole host of marketing activities to my daily tasks to be perfectly honest.   

Waiting for a 12 month baseline also means any activities I add to the basic every day tasks should be more measurable (hopefully) and hey, there are only another six months to go anyway .

So how have the first six months been?  ok, I think is the correct word.  We have 3 revenue streams now, the last is still a work in progress.  We’ve had a major VAT rebate which enabled us to purchase more stock and different stock.  We had a few minor changes made to our online boutique and we’ve increased our followers on Twitter and Facebook  (never under-estimate the power of either of these areas of social networking), and we now send out a monthly newsletter (numbers requesting to receive that increase every week too!).   In fact when I think back to where we were six months ago to where we are now, I am very impressed with what we have managed to achieve.

So whats next?  well, we’d like to have some more changes made to our online boutique, one of those being the ability to show customer reviews, this will help with brand awareness and give customers confidence in our brand as well as enabling us to see what we are doing right and what we are potentially doing wrong.  We need to review our half-finished business plan (oops) and I’d like to write some sort of social networking plan – I feel we neglect this area too often and could be making more of it.  We will continue with the set up of third revenue stream and monitor all our streams to ensure we are making the most of each – they are all different and have different requirements and we need to start thinking about Christmas in terms of what fairs and events we will attend as an exhibitor and start getting them booked up.  Once we start getting some better weather we will also be making a foray into photography to see if we can come up with some fantastic lifestyle shots without paying too much for them.  I could go on, our list is huge and seemingly never-ending.  Last but not least, we will try to do more regular blog posts….whilst trying not to bore you……

A last note for today, BST starts 27th March so don’t forget to put those clocks forward, not got one?  we have a few………..

We were up bright and early on Sunday am to pack the children off to Grandma’s and so we arrived at Earls Court just before 10am.  We managed to get an exorbitantly priced parking space within Earls Court itself and after a quick hop and a skip there we were, collecting our badges.

I was immediately struck by the amount of spaciousness and by a man with slicked back hair (later worked out I recognised him as he had been on one on those “turn our inherited mansion into a business” programmes……).  Anyway, space was good, lots of room for us to see all the products.  We saw a few current suppliers, a few that were new to us and some that I had stalked on the web but had not ordered from or contacted as yet.

It’s always good to see products in the flesh, you get to have a touchy feel so you can test the general quality and size – we all use dimensions etc within our web boutiques but how many customers actually understand/take note of those dimensions, I know I don’t, I’m constantly surprised at the size of some items when they arrive from the suppliers .

One supplier I was looking forward to meeting in particular makes candles,  to a very high quality I had been led to believe from not only their own website but from someone I know who regularly purchases their candles from a bricks and mortar that stocks them and who had suggested Lindsay Interiors stocks them as a good fit to the rest of our range.  When I first looked them up on the web I was astounded by their pricing but now that I have seen them in the flesh (and smelt every one in a lingering fashion) I can see how damn huge and beautifully scented they are.  I can concur on the subject of quality and value but, none of this aids me really, I still won’t be stocking them as I think any perspective customer would have the same misgivings as I originally had re value.  I think candles unless purely for decorative purposes will always be the domain of the physical shop rather than the virtual.

Moving on, we found some interesting clocks and stunning light fixtures, some very tactile cushions and a rather amusing brand of teatowels and mugs.  All in all,  we have plenty of new products to spend our eagerly anticipated VAT refund on.  We had some lovely chats with people, someone actually said they recognised our company name – I think they were just being polite – and no-one was rude, wooohooo, there was also no tat and no sign of a single meerkat.  There was however a very eager sales lady who tried to catch us EVERY time we walked past to show us their magnetic light switch covers, apparently kids adore them.

At 1pm we found ourselves walking through the exit, only as we had seen everything at least twice.  As we were not due to pick the children up til 6ish we decided to entertain ourselves in Chinatown for the rest of the afternoon, I won’t go into details here but we did have a very nice lunch.

Our consensus was that this show had a much “younger” feel to it, and was generaly a lot more pleasant that Harrogate.  We’ve yet to try out one of the NEC shows but we will definitely attend Top Drawer next January….

We launched almost 4 months ago, seems longer than that doesn’t it!  I have to say I am delighted with performance so far.  We started with a reasonably small product range but that certainly hasn’t held us back, we started selling through an extra revenue stream in October which has been hugely beneficial to us in terms of getting our brand out there, they get about 140k more visitors a week to their site than we do .  Our likers in Facebook have grown as well as our Twitter followers.  We’ve given a few products away for competition prizes and we’ve taken a stall at a local village Christmas Fair – not a great event for sales but excellent for new sign ups.   November’s sales were excellent but next year I’d like to see those numbers doubled, surprisingly Decembers numbers were about the same, I thought they may have been more but from what I have read it seems that is the way the online retail market performed in Nov/Dec 2010 as a whole.  What has surprised me is January’s sales, as we are so new and we don’t have any “last years” stock to get rid of we decided not to hold a sale this season but that hasn’t stopped the orders.  We are currently running at about half the sales numbers of Nov/Dec for Jan but almost all orders have been for large pieces of metal wall art, perhaps people are doing their spring cleaning/decorating early this year….. long may it continue.

These great sales figures have allowed us to plough more money into more stock, this means we have increased out range by approx 50% which in turn helps our organic SEO – we don’t currently pay for any SEO activity and won’t do until we something more substantial to measure the results against but thats a whole other post subject.

We’ve completed (or our accountant did ) our first VAT return.  This one was complicated as we claimed for full rate up to a certain date and then flat rate from that date onwards.  The return is claiming for a few thousand pounds refund so we are looking forward to receiving that.  The proceeds from this will pay for a few small development items concerning our online boutique and more stock. 

We are going to visit Top Drawer at Earls Court for the first time this Sunday, am looking forward to it especially as this show appears to be more design led, plus we have a better idea now of what to look for, ask about etc – for more on this read our post re Harrogate Home and Gift .

December also saw us kick off our monthly newsletter, the first one went out the week before Christmas when the weather was causing worrying delays for deliveries so we offered all our local customers free personal delivery which went down a treat. 

We have started to get feedback on our products and service from customers and are delighted to say that it has all been positively glowing (and they are not all friends and family honest!!) It is lovely to have that confirmation that what you are doing is right.

All the latest news re the retail (online and otherwise) speaks of doom and gloom and an austere 2011 continuing on from 2010, but we refuse to have our spirits dampened, all the time people want the opportunity to purchase beautiful, unusual, good quality interior accessories we will be around to supply them  

To sign up for our newsletter please email admin@lindsayinteriors.co.uk with your name and email address. To visit (and like!) our FB page please visit www.facebook.com/lindsayinteriors.  If you’d like to place an order or just have a browse and a nose visit www.lindsayinteriors.co.uk

Said Daughter is 10 but thinks she is 18 therefore she dislikes the standard outfits that are currently in the supermarket – if anyone has missed them which is extremely doubtful they are little fairy type outfits just in dark colours - which meant we had to get creative…..we have ended up with the following -

red and black net tutu with plain long-sleeved black top and black leggings, a long black wig with red stripes, a pair of shiny red false eyelashes, a headband with sequined horns, black pumps and long velvet red gloves and red nail varnish, now that we have the outfit and the stress of being reminded on a daily basis by my Daughter to buy her an outfit I can’t wait to see her in it!!

While on this shopping trip to acquire above outfit it was duly noted that Halloween seems to becoming a bigger occasion here in the UK every year and I’ve wondered if this means people will start to spend more on Halloween inspired interior items to decorate their home with, whether they are hosting a party or just for the benefit of trick or treaters.  We have two brick gateposts at the end of our drive and we always put lit pumpkins on each one to signify to the trick or treaters that we are “taking part” in the season, to me it’s a more elegant way of decorating, I can’t stand all the fake cobweb, spider, monster stuff that is around.

If you are looking for inspiration, either for your own home or to give as a gift to a host/ess then take a look at some of our gorgeous (even if I do say so myself) products – www.lindsayinteriors.co.uk

We have chocolate and orange coloured enamelled aluminium bowls, in oval and handkerchief shapes http://tinyurl.com/2w5qlv4

Fantastic orange mugs and teatowels http://tinyurl.com/3abq2mf

Some stunning wall art that can be hung outside http://tinyurl.com/2urmv9x

Wreaths that smell gorgeous http://tinyurl.com/2ugunum

Whilst visiting why not sign up for our mailing list (bottom left hand corner), we only send out the occasional newsletter when we have something special to tell you, we won’t spam you and will not send your details to anyone else, ever.  

So,  the last week has been a bit of a rollercoaster, lots of fantastic feedback, a few orders and an invitation from an umbrella company to sell via their site as well as the Lindsay Interiors site – may post more about that later.  In among that lot we’ve also had some more dev work completed on the site – email me when in stock and promotional code setup.  Not to mention google analytics – could spend all day looking at that stuff!

Once the promo code area was setup and live I couldn’t resist trying it out and so have set up a promotion for all Facebook “likers” to receive 10% discount and free delivery if they order before the 30th Sept, so far the promotion has worked rather well and we have managed to acquire a really healthy number of new “likers”, on top of that, we have also tried out Facebook advertising which has had surprising results even though it still has another day to run yet. 

What with google analytics and the Facebook advertising I have had to rapidly learn a whole new dictionary of terms and acronyms but I do find it rather fascinating.

We are here, Lindsay Interiors has arrived, let us know what you think www.lindsayinteriors.co.uk

is now just days away and I’m not too proud to admit that I am now very very scared and way out of my comfort zone.

I find myself subconsciously looking for reasons not to launch which is more than slightly ridiculous considering the initial reason for doing this in the first place and not least the amount of money invested so far….

In my panic I found myself commenting to my better half, “what if someone orders something”….it’s all been under wraps so far, I can see and access the website to upload products etc and make changes where required, the stock is all at home and inventoried, the packaging materials are all there waiting to be filled….

Of course I do want people to love our products and site so much that they want to visit again and again to see what’s new, of course we want lots and lots of orders so we can grow and add more lines and products, it’s just that for months it’s been my little baby which I feel I am about to hand over, that is actually a great analogy, I guess this is how it would feel to be pregnant, loving the experience of the baby growing, making lots of changes at home to compensate, getting excited but worried about the “birth” and hoping there won’t be any serious complications…..I wonder what the equivalent of a caesarean would be…think that may be taking the analogy too far

So, very busy weekend ahead sorting out last-minute details, have I mentioned how much I dislike images and photos and their manipulation? I feel another blog post coming on……, luckily the children and other half are away so I can spend the entire weekend locked in the world of Lindsay Interiors…

All in all I am happy with the first collection but am conscious of that I will need to order more stock very quickly after launching to add to my existing lines.  We have about 60 odd lines to go live with, we will add product lines every month, difficult to judge how many exactly, will have to see what happens when we launch, but I do already have some products in mind, some wonderful crockery with word art…..some fantastic contemporary prints like this one on the right….some great clocks, the list is never-ending and it’s the favourite part of my job   I love that you’ll be able to come to Lindsay Interiors online boutique on a regular basis and always find something new…..

We now have a large number of large boxes situated around the house as they currently have no other home, I briefly looked into self storage facilities locally but they wanted too much money, so will keep on looking.  In the meantime finding the relevant product at the relevant time will be an interesting experience.  We also have a whole host of necessary packaging equipment around like boxes, protection materials, tabs and labels, tape and guns, and so it goes on.  The more I think about this the more I think I am going to have to prioritise the storage facility if anyone knows of anything going spare let me know

Talking of packaging, as each item comes in I have checked the packaging, removing labels where relevant and deciding on “shipping out” packaging, protection and sealing for that particular item, of course some people may order multiple products so bigger packaging may also be required but we’ve taken that into account.  We have new labels and fabric labels (for cushions and lavender hearts made by yours truly) in progress.

This whole back order process that the suppliers work to is a new one on me, the fact that some suppliers will automatically charge you and ship out when the remainder of the order is ready, some will scrub those items from your order completely without telling you and some tell you to contact them in a few weeks to see if the items are available and if you still want them, hard to keep a tally and a potential issue on the cashflow front.

Onwards and upwards

How frustrated I became when trying to set up a business page for Lindsay Interiors.  I have used facebook personally on and off for some years and noticed through twitter that a lot of people had business facebook pages.  At the time my website design was only beginning and I felt that facebook would be an ideal outlet to publish pictures and reviews of products that I was constantly finding and getting excited about but didn’t have an appropriate place to share with anyone. 

All well and good but anyone who has tried to create a business page on facebook I’m sure will agree, what a nightmare……firstly, I had to create a new account so I decided to use the Lindsay Interiors standard email account, but no, facebook doesn’t like email accounts beginning with the word admin, so I had to create a new email account for Lindsay Interiors purely to satisfy facebook. 

Oh what issues I had, it was important for me to keep my personal and business pages completely separate but I never knew which account I was logged in under so I would do updates on Lindsay Interiors to find that the update would appear on my personal facebook page, not good, I would have to delete it and start again, I did this numerous times.  I found I couldn’t suggest Lindsay Interiors to friends, I couldn’t like other business pages etc etc, it was completely unusable.  I spent a lot of time trawling the web and the facebook help pages looking for solutions and eventually came across a semi helpful document – believe me this took some time to find.  I was missing a “profile” for Lindsay Interiors, so what I had to do was create a profile through which I could manage the business page of Lindsay Interiors.  Once I did that, I could suggest “like” to friends and do all the tasks I could not do previously.

I did notice throughout all the above that I was not alone, other people on twitter seemed to have the same issues so this is something that facebook really need to sort out, a clear simple set of instructions would do the job perfectly – that can be easily found I must add.

So, here I am with a great facebook business page, oh but wait, now I can’t load photos, aaaarrrrgggghhhh, for a week I tried to create photo albums, in fact I managed to create 28 (which are still there, empty but I can’t delete them).  Eventually the issue resolved but I pity anyone who is relying solely on facebook business pages to run their business.  It’s ok as a marketing and advertising tool but forget it for reliability.

If you would like to see what a facebook business page looks like then come and visit us (and like us if you do:)) http://tinyurl.com/3xa8pny