Royal Mail Strike

As you're probably aware Royal Mail postal workers are going on strike on Friday 29th June 2007. Because of this, we'll not be able to post out any orders on Friday, we do plan however to process and pack as normal and will be bringing the mail directly to Royal Mail on Saturday morning, which will hopefully be processed for delivery at the beginning of the week.
We'd like to apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and hope we can keep the disruption to a minimum by managing our dispatch system as efficiently as possible.

Unfortunately being based in Northern Ireland there's no cost effective alternative to Royal Mail and we're stuck with them for now. If the situation does escalate, we'll have no choice but to look for alternative delivery options and hope that we can absorb the extra costs and still remain competitive. For more information on the Royal Mail Strike visit our website

Children's tiaras and accessories.

An area of "Bridal Gems" that's been a little neglected over the past few years is our kids range of accessories. Although we've always done a few tiaras that can be adjusted to fit anyone from 4 years up, it's only now that we've started to do a range specially selected for the younger members of the wedding party.


The headbands above are just a few of the new range, with a choice of popular colours available. We've also introduced some small tiara combs like the one below.


We plan to extend the range further over the next few months and maybe even have a separate kids section on the site. If you have any comments or suggestions please let us know.

Bridal Gems Discount Coupons

We've finally got round to adding the discount coupon system to the site. It's a pretty straight forward system where the customer is given a code to enter during checkout, this then applies a discount to the order total. The code can be set up to allow any type of discount, a fixed value, postage discount or a percentage discount. To roll the system out we're posting a coupon out with all orders, so repeat customers can get a discount off their next order.
As a thank you to all our blog readers we'd like to offer you a free code so you can get a small discount off your next purchase, just enter the code below during checkout and you'll get 10% off the order.
Discount Coupon Code: BL31
This is a single use code, the full terms and conditions of use can be found on the Terms & Conditions page.


From time to time we'll run bank holiday or weekend promos, we'll post details both here on the blog and at the top of the site so you can easily see if there's any offers currently running.

Hen Night Shop

With the success of the hen night section on Bridal Gems, we've decided to build a whole new Hen Night Shop . The new shop is located at www.toys-central.co.uk, we chose this domain as it was an existing part of the toys-central.com site and was somewhat under used. We hope you enjoy browsing through the new shop and can find what you're after. Pop a comment on here or drop us a note if you have any suggestions or comments about the new site.

Website Maintenance

The Bridal Gems website www.bridalgems.co.uk will be down for a few hours in the early hours of Wednesday 2nd May 2007. The maintenance is due to last for about 3-4 hours starting at approximately 01.00 GMT on Wednesday. We hope to be up and running again before breakfast time on Wednesday.
The work is in preparation for a new secure certificate we're going to be installing, the new cert will give us full 128 bit encryption through out the site when ever sensitive information needs to be entered.
We've tried to schedule this work for the quietest time, on the quietest day of the week, and hope it doesn't cause too much inconvenience.
The down time will be pretty fluid and some users might not notice any disruption, but as always it's best to err on the side of caution.

UK Wedding Directory

With the rapid growth of the Bridal Gems UK Wedding Directory, we've decided it's time to give it it's own seperate website. The new domain for the directory is www.ukweddingdirectory.info the directory itself hasn't changed and all previously listed sites are still there. Regular submissions are still free, and for a limited time we've reduced the cost of featured listings from £15.00 to £4.99 per year. Over the next few months we'll be building new features into the directory and have a whole new homepage planned with links to all sorts of useful wedding websites.

If you have a wedding related site you can add it to the directory here Submit URL

Bridal Gems Live Help

Our live help system is now discontinued, we provide all support via telephone and email currently, we may introduce live help again if there's demand.

Hen Night Fun

We plan to roll out our new Hen Night accessories by the beginning of March. We've introduced new lines and are planning on expanding it further over the next few months. We've a whole load of fun and exciting gear in the pipline at the usual "Bridal Gems" rock bottom prices. From Signature Tee Shirts @ just £8.99 to Flashing Boobs for under a fiver, we've got something for everyone.

We will of coarse be keeping the old favourites, like the plastic tiara and veil and the ever popular Learner kits. So why not drop by and have a look.

Hen Night Accessories.

Update from Bridal Gems

Well it's been almost a month since I posted on here and just thought I better drop by and say hello. The new year has started with a bang and we've all been busy packing orders and keeping the web site updated. The beginning of February has continued the same as January and the orders have been flowing in thick and fast. We did manage to get a few days earlier this month with some of our suppliers and are happy to announce the arrival of two completely new product ranges for later in the spring. The first and biggest is a range of new jewellery, the collection consists of about 24 new necklace and earring sets and half a dozen different matching bracelets. There are a couple of new tiaras in the range also, but as we have over 80 different styles already in our portfolio we didn't go to heavily on these. The second new range is the long awaited update to the Hen Night and accessories section of the site, we've got some super fun new novelties, and a few new wedding favour ranges. The first to arrive should be the hen night and accessories which will hopefully be online some time towards the end of February. The new jewellery collection is still in production but should be here by early April.
All in all it's a busy few months here and I don't expect to get as much time as I used to for updating the blog, I will however be sure to keep it refreshed with new news and information as often and possible.

A Quick Thank You

Just a quick word of thanks to those customers who visited us at the Everglades Hotel yesterday. The show was a huge success with hundreds of visitors enjoying the fashion shows and dozens of exhibits. It was great to meet some of you face to face and we really do hope you enjoyed our display.


Due to space restrictions we could only show part the range but it was great for customers to actually feel the quality of the products before buying, and the feedback at the show was very much appreciated.
We're now looking forward to our next outing (The Beechlawn House) where we hope to have an even better display with more products and a few specials not available on the website.

Beechlawn House Hotel - Wedding Show

Our latest confirmed wedding fair venue is the Beechlawn House Hotel in Dunmurry, just outside Belfast. The show is on Sunday 4th March 2007 from 1pm - 6pm and we'll be showing with a whole range of other quality wedding professionals. For more information on our show venues visit our Irish Wedding Shows site.

New 2007 Jewellery Range

Along with the old favourites from 2006, we're introducing some exciting new jewellery for 2007. The range will be introduced over the next few weeks on a rolling basis and will be available to purchase as soon as stock arrives. The main focus will be to increase the number of rhinestone bracelets as this has been an area in which we were light in 2006. There's a few new necklace sets and some tiaras also being added. We don't have any plans to discontinue any jewellery this year, however if supply of an items becomes difficult we might have to revise this.

I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank all our customer over the past year and wish you all a happy and prosperous New Year.

Nigel

Wedding Show Update

We've started finalising details of where we'll be showing in 2007, the first show is planned for the Everglades Hotel just outside Londonderry in Northern Ireland. The Everglades is a great 4 star hotel and a super wedding venue. As well as covering the Derry area, it also attracts brides from Donegal and all over the north west of Ireland. We'll be there on Sunday 14th January from 2-5 pm. We have more shows planned and will be anouncing them as soon as we finalise the details.
More information can be found here www.irish-wedding-shows.bridalgems.co.uk the most up to date info will be found here.

Christmas Toy Rush

Traditionally this time of year is pretty quiet here at Bridal Gems, most brides are thinking about Christmas and the spring or summer wedding goes on the back boiler for a while. This year to keep busy we've started selling a range of cheap toys, through our website www.toys-central.co.uk and eBay. We're not targeting the mass hysteria toys like playstation version 2 million and six, which tend to have mass hysteria price tags, instead we're concentrating on budget toys and stocking fillers. We've imported a wide range and are concentrating our efforts on selling through eBay. I've no doubt we'll keep at the toys in the new year although obviously they'll have to be scaled down a bit as the bridal side of the business picks up again.
For those of you still looking for bridal jewellery, please don't worry we're keeping the Bridal Gems website going and are getting most orders out within 24 hours.

Where have we been all weekend

As many will have noticed we were not available on the phone or email over the weekend 17th - 20th November, we're now catching up with the almost 600 phone calls and emails missed over the period. We hadn't planned on disappearing :-) but had simply popped over to Scotland for a family function on Saturday and couldn't get back to Northern Ireland because of the weather. Some orders have been delayed but only by about 24 hours, and all are now being processed.

We'd like to apologize to all our customers and have been trying to get in touch with everyone who has left us messages over the weekend. Anyone who still needs to get in touch can now give us a call on 0800 043 4850

Irish Wedding Shows

We're currently searching for wedding shows and bridal fairs through out Ireland. If you're an event organizer and would be interested in having Bridal Gems exhibit at your show give Nigel Carson a call on 0845 2571715 or fill in the form on the Bridal Gems web site, Irish Wedding Shows.
We're happy to consider all types of wedding related show regardless of size or location. At most events we'll be exhibiting our full range of Tiaras and Jewellery, and were available will set-up a fully interactive website portal for placing orders at the show.
This is a really exciting opportunity for event organizers to have one of the UK's largest wedding jewellery retailers exhibit at their show. Our show dates and venues will be fully advertised on BridalGems.co.uk which has thousands of visitors every day and will be a great benefit and asset to the shows we choose to exhibit at.

Free Phone Order Line

0800 043 48 50

From Monday 16th October 2006 our new Free Phone number will be fully operational, we've been testing it over the weekend, and are still ironing out a few small problems. Along with the new free phone number we've also added a new standard number and have introduced an out of hours answering service. Our old numbers are still fully operational and we have no plans to remove these however we will be replacing all contact information on the site to reflect the new numbers.

Our Contact Details Are:

Free Phone 0800 043 48 50
UK Standard Number 028 6638 0027
Republic of Ireland 048 6638 0027
International +4428 6638 0027

International customers please remember we're based in the UK and use British time (GMT) when calling you'll need to check what time it is here, so you're not calling in the middle of the night :-)

Wedding Directory

Submissions to the UK Wedding Directory are still fairly steady and most accepted sites are listed within 72 hours. The directory is of coarse still free and we're happy to consider all sites however we do request that you list the site in the most appropriate category.

Making Payments To Bridalgems

If you've read through this blog or had a look at our website www.bridalgems.co.uk you'll know that we accept many different forms of payment. There's really no need to go through all the different options here as they're well documented elsewhere. What I do want to say here is a quick word about helping us identify your payment, you'd be amazed just how many times we open an envelope with nothing but a cheque or postal order inside. Although it's a bit of a pain, we can usually trace the order by looking at the amount on the cheque, the name (if it matched the order) and in extreme cases the post office frank to see where the envelope was posted. As you can imagine a simple slip of paper with an order number or even the buyers name would be a great help. The other payment type that causes us problems is direct bank transfer, now this is a little more tricky as not all banks let you put a note with the payment, but if they do then again either the order number or name would be fine. The other point about all payments, especially if you don't plan putting a note with them, is to make sure they are for the exact amount. Again many people round payments up, for example an order total of £16.45 and they send a cheque for £16.50, no big deal if there's a name with the payment, but a problem if there's not.
Having said all this I think there's only been a handful of occasions were we couldn't match payments with orders, and even in these cases we've been able to sort them as soon as the customer contacts us. The real problem is speed of processing, as with all things we want to get the payments cleared and orders out as quickly as possible.
In summary, put a little note with all payments with either your order number or name and pay the exact amount. We don't need a fancy typed letter, just any old scrap of paper with it quickly scribbled on will do. :-)

New Toys Central Website

Toy Central sell an amazing range of Hen Night Accessories. It's worth checking out the bargains available.