to you all. Thought it’s about time I gave you all an update on the status of Lindsay Interiors today.
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 🙂
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