New Irish Website

Mid November saw the launch of Bridal Gems Ireland, after about 6 months of development and planning bridalgems.ie went live. The .ie site will have exclusive offers, only available to Ireland and all prices will be shown in euro. To get the ball rolling we're offering free postage and packaging to anywhere in Ireland for orders placed through bridalgems.ie valued over €20. Most old promotion codes from the .uk site should also work on .ie however new codes will be exclusive to either one or the other.

Current delivery times within Ireland are about 3-4 working days (might be a little longer over Christmas) and all orders are posted within 48 hours of receipt.

We're really excited to have bridalgems.ie finally up and running and really look forward to helping Irish brides over the coming months. Between both sites we now have in excess of 11000 satisfied customers, many of whom now shop regularly with Bridal Gems, buying everything from Tiaras to Necklace Sets..

Royal Mail Strike

Amidst the worst recession in UK history royal mail workers have decided to go on strike again. In what seems to be a strike to maintain the crazy working practices of our postal service they are showing no regard for the thousands of small businesses which depend on them.
The Bridal Gems group of companies have loyally used royal mail for many years spending thousands of pounds of our customers money posting hundreds of items every week. To be repaid by the postal workers in this way is quite simply a kick in the face for us and all small businesses. What the future holds for the postal works is far from certain but from our point of view a small increase in the postage we charge our customers to switch to a more reliable service is something we're having to look seriously at.

A Few Links

Bridal Gems

Support

Shop

2010 Collection Starting to Arriving

As the title says our new products for 2010 are starting to appear on the web site now.
Check out the New Wedding Jewellery section for the latest additions.

New Communication System

If you've signed up for an account with us recently you'll notice we now ask for the date of your wedding(if you know it). We're not just being nosey, what we now do is send you a little email 10 days before your wedding so if you've any last orders before the big day you can get them in on time.
Part of the same system also sends a reminder to customers who've not completed their order after a few days, this is just to check there's no problems with the checkout system, as occasionally bugs creep into the system which only affect some browsers or users. The feedback we get from this is great as it helps improve our service and if there's problems we can get them sorted promptly.

Bridal Gems Twitter

We've just started to twitter and hope to post a tweet every day. It might not happen but our intentions are good :-)

Why not pop by www.twitter.com/bridalgems

June Already

I can't believe it's June already, we've been pretty busy lately and I haven't had a chance to do much blogging. There's not been much time to work on the website but we have added loads of new products, as promised we've got a great new range of coloured tiaras and jewellery and these are all available on the site now. We've also added a Frequently asked Questions section which will hopefully answer some of the dozens of queries we get each day, but as always we're here to help if needed.
There's lots of exciting new plans for the coming summer months and we'll be running loads of promotions. We're currently adding new products to the combos section, were we take selections of the most popular products and put them together into one discounted package. Check them out here Discounted Wedding Jewellery

The Hen Night

March is a time when the hen night plans for many summer brides start to be hatched. To help you along, this year Bridal Gems have again increased the range of accessories available. With everything from Hen Night Badges to Complete Kits, we think we've got it all covered. The ever popular "Hen Night Autograph T Shirt" is also still available this year so why not pop along and have a look :-)

Hen Night Accessories

Crazy Product Numbers

Back in the early days of Bridal Gems we had only a few dozen products and decided at the time to give them item numbers based on the type of product. Because there were so few products, we numbered them in 10's so tiaras were coded T10, T20, T30 and so on and necklaces sets N10, N20 etc. This worked fine until the number of products reached hundreds, and when we coupled with that the fact that even discontinued items still had to have codes allocated, we soon started to run out of codes. We then started to use the numbers in between the 10's but this brought up altogether new problems. Our stock control was getting difficult because it was hard to decide on the correct code for a new product and picking orders started to become confusing as 'N' and 'T' or any of the other product prefixes could easily be mixed up and customers understandable wouldn't be to happy receiving a really pretty necklace when they ordered a tiara.
So the solution was unfortunately obvious, we had to re-code our entire stock and implement a system for new products that will last well into the future. Our old system although flawed in some ways, did work very well at the beginning, and a new version of this system is what we decided to use. We'll still be prefixing the number with a letter representing the product type, and so as not to get mixed up with old codes we're starting with T1001, T1002 etc for tiaras and to help avoid the picking errors we decided to start necklaces at N2001, and earrings at E3001 and so on.
With 1000's products in our database, the task of re-coding and making sure all reference to the old coding system are changed is quite a big one. We've had to work really fast as the worst possible situation is to have two different systems on the go at one time, as of today all reference to the old codes should have disappeared, the only exception is a few items listed on eBay which can't be change until the auctions finish. Just to be safe, and because we realise there might well be parts of the site we've missed, we have kept an old code label in our warehouse on all products and plan to keep them in case of future confusion.

New for 2009

Our new 2009 range is due to be added to our catalogue from the second week in February. We've no plans at this time to discontinue any old items, however as always we're a little bit at the mercy of our manufacturers, if they do drop any lines we will of coarse try to source suitable replacements.
We hope to add an assortment of 20-30 new tiaras and necklace sets, with special emphasis on children's tiaras and coloured adult tiaras, as this is an area we're a bit light in.
Another plan for 2009 is to put together packages of tiaras at reduced prices, we're doing this to help brides on a tight budget who maybe have to buy for all there bridesmaids. We'll probably stick with the most popular budget tiaras and package them in twos, threes, fours and sixes with prices reduced by 20-30 percent. We were thinking about making up packages of matching necklace, earrings, bracelet and tiara, and although we haven't totally ruled it out, it may be better to just let the bride mix and match and get what they want.
We're all looking forward to another great year in 2009, we're fortunate that we've got a solid business model that will be able to withstand the economic recession we're all being told about daily, and have actually had to recruit more staff to meet recent demand. We hope our "value for money" prices will help both our customers who are on a tight wedding budget and us as we attract new customers who are looking for a bargain.
I might not get blogging much over the next few weeks as things get a little bit hectic around here this time of year, but I'll try to post up any important information.