2011 Price Increases

Well bad news is never easy to report, but we hope this early warning helps all you struggling brides get your orders in before the price rises kicks in. The UK VAT rate is going up to 20% in January 2011 and because of increased material and transport costs we've no choice but to increase our prices at the same time. We will be keeping the increase to a minimum and don't expect any rises of more that 15%, and where possible we'll be adding as little 2.5% which just covers the VAT rise. Our prices have remained stable for over 3 years now mainly due to the advantageous rate of the pound to the dollar, and if the pound remains strong we might even be able to absorb some of the up coming price rises.
We guarantee no increase before 1st January and all orders placed before this will be at the current prices. The exact changes will be made over the new year holidays, and at the same time we hope to introduce several new lines, including tiaras, necklace sets and wedding accessories.

Royal Wedding

With all the doom and gloom about at the minute, isn't it great to get some happy news. Todays announcment that William and Kate are to get married in the Spring or Summer of 2011 is great news. I'm just about old enough to remember the last "real" Royal wedding, when Charles and Diana tied the knot and the buzz then was really something special. I doubt if I'll be getting a call about the royal tiara, but just in case I'll keep the phone lines clear lol, or maybe being the modern couple they are she'll be buying online, in which case I better get working on a special royal wedding discount coupon code :-)

Anyway joking aside I'd just like to offer my best wishes to the happy couple and hope they have a long and pleasant life together.

Free Postage & Packaging

It's been a few years since we offered free postage on Bridal Gems UK so we thought it was time to give it a go again. For orders of £30 or more you'll have the option of free first class postage to anywhere in the UK. We'll still be offering paid special delivery postage for those urgent orders, and most international shoppers can get free or discounted postage by visiting our sister sites Bridal Gems Europe, Bridal Gems Ireland or Bridal Gems US

2011 Tiara Collection

We've just started work on our 2011 collection, we plan to introduce about 10 new tiara styles next year. Currently we're searching around for inspiration and would love to hear ideas from 2011 brides. If you're getting married next year why not drop us a note with suggestions or comments we're always happy to hear from you. Our Bridal Gems contact form is the fastest way to get in touch or just reply here.

Confetti.co.uk Goes Bust

I was amazed and extremely saddened to hear that confetti has gone bust, I've used the confetti forums many times over the years and thought they were a great asset to brides and wedding planners. The current recession has certainly taken it's toll on our industry, just as it has throughout the economy. The collapse of confetti has come as a surprise to everyone as the business was sold to 'The Hut Group' just last week, but put into administration 24 hours later. The Hut Group appears to have been more interested in Iwantoneofthose.com which it purchased along with confetti.

With reported losses last year of 13.8m GBP it's difficult to see where the businesses will go from here but lets hope the confetti brand is saved and the website survives.
Obviously we have no connection with confetti so can't directly help their disappointed customers, but by stocking up to 100 pieces of each style of tiara we sell, we're in a position to dispatch orders rapidly if any bride is left in a spot. All we ask is you tell us your wedding date so we can be sure to get the order to you on time.

If you've been let down by confetti, we want to help, put coupon code CGB20 in the box during checkout and we'll take 20% off your order total. I know it's not much but hope it helps a little.

Bridal Gems UK Make Over

We've finally finished the new look for Bridal Gems UK. It's not the biggest make over we've ever done but it has tidied up things a bit and hopefully you'll like it.

New Side Tiara

A new side tiara comb arrived today, it's a crystal butterfly design and it looks stunning.

Twenty Thousand and Counting

Just noticed to-day that we now have over fifteen thousand website customers and about six thousand on eBay. When we started out on eBay in 2002 we certainly couldn't have dreamed we'd have helped over 20,000 people with their jewellery. It really is humbling to think of all the weddings and events our tiaras and accessories have been used in. We've posted orders all over the world, from obscure islands in the Pacific to the northern tips of Europe. Although most are used for weddings, some have been used on TV shows, pageants and even the odd fancy dress party. I guess it shouldn't really surprise us having so many customers, as every year new brides are getting married and we have to attract a whole new set of customers. Although having said that, it still amazes me how many repeat orders we get from the same people. I do hope they're ordering for other special events and not getting married over and over again :-)

I'm so slow at updating the blog these days that my next post will probably be about us reaching 40, 000 customers, but I'll try to make it sooner lol.

New Products

This week we've launched two new stunning silver tiaras, one with some small white pearls and one with rhinestone flower designs.

The picture above is the Flowering Hearts Pearl and Rhinestone Tiara, with an introductory price of just £18.99 and below is the Swirling Flowers Crystal Silver Wedding Tiara priced just £23.99
Along with these tiaras we've also launched some great new bracelets, these can be viewed in the Rhinestone Bracelet section of the website.
This year so far we've added dozens of new lines and reduced loads of prices, in these difficult times we feel it's important to give our customers, not only great value but a great choice of new and exciting products too. As always we're happy to hear your thoughts and comments so please feel free to leave a message.

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.

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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.