Pins and Ribbons is going online-only
Fine furnishing maker Kerrie Murray set up her online store Pins and Ribbons in 2007 before opening a bricks-and-mortar store in her hometown of Cleveland in the North East of England. Six years on and she has decided to shut-up shop and focus on her ecommerce offering. I caught up with her to find out why.
Tell me about how Pins and Ribbons started
I first started selling my products at craft markets and in 2007 I decided to create a website and test the market online. Soon after that I opened the shop so that we could have a local presence. We were still running the online shop but decided to really push the brick-and-mortar store.
Although the store it successful it just doesn’t have the as great access to our target market and overall reach of the online store. With that in mind I decided to rebrand and relaunch the website to focus on that. The new site went live last month.
The site we had built in 2007 was working well but it was looking very basic and we wanted to rebrand to create the ‘WOW’ presence online. We really wanted the website to match the products – they are high-end, very well-made pieces using British fabrics.
Why have you decided to focus on your online store?
We feel that online we can be so much more successful – it is where the money comes from and we want to put all of our resources into our online presence.
The shop does very well and we run the office along side the shop so if we don’t have anything to do in the store my staff have plenty of work to do online. Our manufacturing site however is two miles away which can cause huge problems and delays in sorting out queries and getting things back and forth.
So we are going to move our office closer to the manufacturing site and close the store. The office won’t have a shop function but customers will still be able to come to us locally for blind and curtain consultations etc. All by appointment.
What has been the biggest challenge in re-launching your store?
Really the time that it takes, we started re-launching in November of last year and only launched in April. I thought it would take two months but it has taken so much longer than I would have guessed. We used the same developer that created our original store, we have worked very closely with him down the years so he was the natural choice to do the redesign.
We are really pleased with the result – it looks great. But with just like a physical shop, you have to continually update the site and keep it looking fresh.
Why did the redesign take so much longer than you had thought?
We wanted to do so much! We wanted to completely rebrand, re-write all of our product copy, take all of the product photographs again etc. This was a huge amount of work – especially when you see how many products we have in the range and in the various fabrics. We had to create all of this new content and put it all onto the site – I think we just underestimated how long it would take.
What have you done differently this time around in terms of functionality?
We have added an account setting into the new site so our customers can create an account with all of their details stored. We have also created the ability to for customers to track their orders and see when things have been dispatched and where they are. We have created a interlinks with the couriers in make the process more transparent.
Why do you think this is important?
In today’s retail world there is so much competition online! Customers don’t want to pick up the phone to find out information about their orders and have to wonder where they are. They want to quickly and efficiently be able to find their order progress. I think this kind of service helps to create a huge amount of repeat business, a good buying experience makes it easier for shoppers. Everybody is in a rush nowadays you need to make it as easy and quick as possible.
As well as those changes we have built in a trade website that runs alongside the normal consumer one not accessible by our non-trade customers. We supply to some 250 UK-based retailers and we also sell overseas to countries such as Germany, France, Italy – even Australia.
How easy do you find the process of selling overseas?
It’s easy to to get the orders in, it’s the nature of having an online store. What is more problematic is getting products to the customers. We sell a lot of heavy products and it can be a little bit costly in shipping and logistics. So far this has been manageable – just this morning got another order via the online site from Germany for 300 units of draft excluders. Processing the order is exactly the same as orders from the UK but the logics of getting the product out are harder.
We do shop around to get the best price and we are always being approached by shopping companies and couriers offering deals. We will continue to look for the best option as we want to drive sales to the overseas market. One problem with overseas is that if you haven’t got the volume of orders you can’t get the good deals. So an increase in sales could help to solve that issue.
Do you sell in online marketplaces?
We sell via Not On The High Street – it very much fits our branding. The problem we have with Amazon is that it expects immediate dispatch after an order. Our products are handmade so we can’t turn them around quick enough for that.
How to you market your site?
We have a heavy use of social media – we try and drive customers towards our website through promotions on the various platforms. We also send our loyal customers emails and also get traffic through our newsletter systems. We also look at keywords for SEO and make sure if someone is searching for a product we come up as one of the top results. We have also found that speaking to the press is a great channel to get us out there and it drives business and enquiries.
What advice would you give to someone who was planning to open an online store?
Don’t underestimate the long hours involved in running an online shop and setting one up. Once it’s set up it will still constantly need refreshing, adding to and changing it around – look at it as a brick and mortar store – when someone comes in, things need to fresh and new.
Another thing we struggle with in having an online store is the open access to your business. We have had copycat businesses try to jump on the back of our success and copy our business. People see our website and can see close up imagery of products and try to launch their own website.
We write the copy for our products in a very specific way and we have seen people just copy it word for word on their own sites. Most of these copycat businesses fail and don’t last long but it can be hugely frustrating when you work so hard and put in so much work only to have it copied.
We have solicitors that help us when things like that happen and we are also members of an organisation called ACID (Anti Copying In Design) and they will act on our behalf is someone copies our products and business.
What is next for you and your business?
It the next thing is to create a mobile optimised site. We wanted to get the new site launched first and the next stage is to allow it to create a mobile-friendly platform. We do a lot of checking of sites on smartphones and iPads so we want people to be able to log on from those devices and have a good experience in our shop.
www.pinsandribbons.co.uk
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