Weddings and Gifts

weddingsandgifts.com is the US branch of Bridal Gems, it went live just last month and although it's now full operational it's still being developed, over the next few months it'll be officially launched, with special offers and promotions galore. With over 5 million weddings in the US each year we hope we can help everyone with their wedding jewellery, or should that be wedding jewelry since we're talking about America.

The site is a slight variation off the usual Bridal Gems theme with a new Black and yellow color scheme.We'll be offering almost our intire range in the US with the exception of a few accessories such as wedding bubbles, which are too heavy to ship. Thanks to a new deal with Royal Mail we are offering exceptionally low shipping charges, and for next few months we're actually offering free shipping on orders over $30.

Two Minute Checkout?

We're always trying to improve the customers experience on our websites and I was just taking a look at customer checkout stats on bridalgems.co.uk. I decided to do a quick average to see how long it takes to complete the checkout process from entering the name and address to completion. I just looked at one weeks worth of data as rough guide, and was surprised to find virtually every customer who completed checkout finished it in under 3 minutes and the average time was just over 2 minutes. I've no idea how this compares to other shopping sites, but it seems pretty fast to me and I don't think there's much we could do to improve it.

If you've any thoughts or suggestions why not contact us or leave a comment on any of our blog posts, we're always happy to hear suggestions.

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

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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.

Reduced UK VAT

At the time of writing, the reduction in UK VAT is still just speculation, but if the expected cut in the rate does happen, we've already geared up to implement the reduced prices immediately. As we don't know for sure how much the VAT may be cut by, or the exact date of implementation, we're going to have to wait and see what happens. What we are doing now is making sure we're ready to lower prices across the websites as soon as physically possible.
Obviously we've no idea at this time how long the reduced VAT will last, but it's great news for our customers with lower prices all round.

That time of year again!

Strange as it may sound, but "that time of year" (November/December) for us is time for Amanda and myself to take a short sunshine break and recharge the batteries ready for the upcoming bridal season. We're heading away on December 3rd this year for just a week, and will be back December 10th. Our little break will probably add a few days on to delivery times for most website orders over this period, but as always we'll have the estimated delivery date posted on the website, and give plenty of notice before we leave.
We'll do our best to keep answering emails, and this year we should have the free phone support line staffed most afternoons, unfortunately although we'll be able to take telephone orders they won't be processed until we return.
I'm sure I'll repeat this in a later post, but I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank all those customers and friends who have supported us through the year, 2008 although difficult in trading terms, has been one of the most enjoyable we've had since starting Bridal Gems all those years ago. We're thoroughly looking forward to another great year in 2009 and even through all the economic doom and gloom being spread by the press, we know we're going to help thousands of brides have their dream wedding no matter what wedding budget they're on.

Nigel

Credit Crunch

For all businesses an economic recession is certainly a scary time, and every responsible company should be looking at how their business is run and make sure it's in a sound financial position to with stand any potential down turn. Here at Bridal Gems we're no exception and thankfully we have not yet experienced a reduction in business, if fact October 2008 was our busiest October ever, having said that we're not taking things for granted, we have allot of plans for the 2009 season and hope to introduce several new products. We're also looking at ways of reducing our prices even further and have already cut the price of several of our most popular lines. With so many people struggling it these difficult times we're doing all we can to help our customers have the wedding they deserve.
As always we welcome suggestions on how we can improve our service, so please feel free to comment.

Website Problems

We've a few problems with the server to-day (Wednesday 1st October 2008), and the bridalgems.co.uk site has been down intermittently over the past few hours. We hope to be back up to full service in the next few hours.

New Look Website

With the summer (if you can call it a summer) over we're at that time of year again when things get a little quieter and we've time to put our minds to website improvment matters. During the summer we upgraded our whole website back end and moved to a UK based server. The move has technically been a huge success, although there's not been much change to the look of the site, the performance has improved greatly. Over the next few weeks we'll be rolling out a new look for the front end of the site and users should see many improvments with the new look due to be completed by about mid October. Feel free to post comments or suggestions either here or on our forum http://www.bridalgems.info/forum

Site updates and server move

This weekend commencing Friday 4th July, we'll be moving the bridalgems.co.uk site to a new home. Up until now our site has been hosted on servers in Atlanta, Georgia in the US, as part of our on going efforts to improve the speed and quality of the site, we're moving to UK based servers. We've fully updated our back end software to support the latest server specifications, which is faster to load and more secure. We don't expect any major down time during the move, and have planned carefully to ensure as little disruption as possible over the weekend.
In the unlikely even that we do run into problems, we will keep the blog live and have a full roll back option should we need it.

Wedding Forum

Ever since the old "UK Wedding Forum" closed down we've been working on a new improved forum and we've finally got to that, ready to launch stage. The biggest difference this time round is we're branding the forum as part of the new Bridal Gems information portal and it's hosted on the bridalgems.info domain. We'll also be heavily promoting the forum to customers on bridalgems.co.uk and to start the ball rolling a 25% discount promotion code will be available for all newly registered members.

Bridalgems.co.uk Site Updates

Over the past couple of weeks we've been doing some major work on the the Bridal Gems website, hopefully we've not caused too much disruption and as most of the work is on the back end of the site it shouldn't be too noticeable. For anyone who's interested, the main bridal gems shopping site runs on a heavily modified Oscommerce shopping cart. The cart has been constantly updated and modified since it was first installed way back in 2003, the latest updates are designed to make it compatible with the newest versions of PHP and mySql, which is the software which keep the site going. The next couple of weeks will see us move the entire site to a new faster server, located here in the UK which should considerably improve the performance of the entire site. The plan is to serve the site from our UK server and keep a mirror back up on the US server we currently run from. This will give us a good solid back-up plan should anything ever go wrong with the main server, and because of the big geographical difference between the two servers it's unlikely that any network problems which might affect one could affect the other.
The new server will also host several of our other website too, but as they're not all live yet I won't post details here, but as soon as they're up and running I'll let the world know. It's been a really busy time on the technical side of things, and we've loads of new plans and features coming along over the next 6 months, with new products, and some great website features and deals. As soon as we get the server move out of the way we'll be working flat out to get them all rolled out.