The site is live!

After months of hard work getting our eCommerce business ready to launch, we’ve finally done it! Eliot Turner Ltd launched a few minutes ago and is ready to take orders of our exclusive handmade jewellery.

We’ve not got all our stock listed yet as this has been an extremely time consuming process. More items of stock will be added to over the next week or two. We’ve implemented a solid stock management system, which will allow us to reorder and list new stock on a weekly basis. As most of our items are either limited editions or one offs, we can offer our customers something extremely unique.

We’re already looking at diversifying into a few other areas but you’ll have to keep an eye on the site to find out more as it happens!

We’ve got a lot happening over the next few weeks so keep coming back to see how we’re doing. We’ll be sharing stats about visitors, turnover levels and experiences via the blog.

Top Tip

If you are planning to manufacture your product and hope to scale your business up quickly then look at ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), sooner rather than later. A successful ERP system will allow you to bring together aspects such as manufacturing, sales, marketing, etc into a seamless process. Alternatively if you are already running an ERP system and looking to sell online, you must review your system to see if it will be able to cope with the changes to your sales / marketing process. An increase in the sales of a certain product could mean that the manufacturing lead time is affected.

I thought I’d provide a sneak peek of what will be unveiled as our website design for Eliot Turner Ltd in a about a week from now. In my previous posts about “Our Brand” you will see how our website will sit nicely alongside all our other materials. I don’t want to spoil the surprise on the 1st of February so we’re not giving much away.

We did produce an initial design last summer, but then went back to the drawing board as we needed to think more carefully about our brand values. You can see our original sneak peek design by clicking here. We promise this is the final design and we’re sticking with it, at least for a few months!

Over the last few months we’ve been working hard to get our ecommerce site (www.eliotturner.com) up and running. We had planned to get everything finished much sooner but have had numerous challenges which we’ve had to overcome. These have included problems with suppliers, changes to our team, increased work load at carrotmedia and other unforeseen problems. We could have pushed for a pre-Christmas launch but decided this was going to be unwise as you can see from our post “Why miss the Christmas Rush”.

I’m happy to report that we’re now only 10 days from our official launch day and are in the final stages.

We’ve prepared a number of blog posts, which will be released over the next 10 days that will give you an insight into our challenges to get this far.

I hope you come back and visit us on launch day which will be the 1st of February 2010. In the meantime enjoy the posts!

As we’re getting close to launching our ecommerce website (www.eliotturner.com) I thought we should talk about some of the processes we’ve been through while building our own brand.

I’ve been in the business of running a media agency for over 5 years and in that time have been involved in the branding design of hundreds of companies. In that time I’ve come to discover that this is a hugely complex area and the design of the Eliot Turner brand was no different. I’m not writing to tell you everything you need to know about branding as this is a massive subject. I’ve outlined some of the techniques that we used to design our brand, but I’d recommend you always work with a skilled designer or media agency. A good brand doesn’t have to cost the earth and by working with a local company you can get really good value for money. As a quick guide you should be looking to pay in the region of £500 to £2000 if you are a small business. Remember that the logo design is only part of a branding process and a brand is more about how your image is carried across all marketing and sales materials in a consistent manner.

Did you know?

The stock market value of The Coca-Cola Company, for example, was around $136 billion in mid-2002, yet the book value (the net asset value) of the business was only $10.5 billion. A vast proportion of the value of the business (around $125 billion) is therefore dependent upon shareholders’ confidence in the intangible assets of the business, and the ability of the company to manage these profitably. Coca-Cola owns few intangibles other than its “secret recipe,” its contracts with its global network of bottlers and its brand names. An independent analysis estimated that the value of the Coca-Cola brand name in mid-2002 was almost $70 billion, well over half of its intangible value.

Source: What is a Brand? By Tom Blackett of Interbrand

Our brand values

Our primary goal in creating the Eliot Turner brand was to promote our strengths and emphasise what we are good at and what we believe in as a business.

Our first job was to create a set of values for the company which are:

• High levels of customer service
• Value for money
• High quality product delivered to a niche market
• Elegance
• Innovate
• Honest, ethical and behave with integrity
• Give our customers different options compared to our competitors
• Care about our customers

Your list of company values becomes something that is often referred to as brand values. It doesn’t need to be a hugely extensive list and in many cases they reflect your own personal beliefs. You need to remember that if you have a list of company values you must always deliver them without fail or you dilute your brand values; this is considered a deadly sin in the branding world.

Your brand values will build the foundations and they must be communicated to the whole team to ensure authenticity. Many businesses jump the gun and start promoting a brand to their customers before they have the buy-in from members of their own team. If your team doesn’t believe in the values of the brand then you’re never going to get customers to buy-in.

Tell your customers

So once you have the buy-in from the team you need to do one more thing before shouting about your brand. Think about how you will communicate your brand values to new members of the team entering your organisation and third parties involved with your business. In the early stages of your business you will be organising advertising and other marketing activities. If you haven’t briefed your suppliers about your brand values they will make their own interpretation which can cause disastrous results. This is just one example in which your brand can be diluted, but even though it may be out of control you can assert a certain level of influence.

Once you have your brand values and have an effective method of internal communication it’s time to tell your customers. Please remember that every possible contact is potentially a new customer, so you need to reinforce your brand values.

These are the key areas we considered:

• Business name
• The names of product lines
• The slogan we use
• Logo design
• The style and quality of our stationery / printed literature
• Product pricing and packaging
• Where we are based
• Marketing
• How our customers could communicate with us
• How our employees perceive our values
• Most importantly the design of our website

We’ve worked on the assumption that if all these factors were in line with our brand values, we will have a constant result of strengthening the brand. As we are an ecommerce business we don’t see customers face to face so it’s sometimes difficult to judge reactions. We knew for certain that an unhappy customer with our brand wouldn’t be a returning customer in the future.

Top Tip

You may have heard of Michael Heppell, who is a bestselling business author. In his book “How to be Brilliant”, Michael talks about fantastic, satisfactory and bad customer service. He uses a great analogy which I’m going to use here. “You’re picking a friend up from the airport and the first thing you ask is, “how was the flight?” Most of the time you will get, “it was ok” and that is the end of the conversation. However, you are just as likely to get this response, “the plane was late taking off, they double booked my seat, they charged me for going 1kg over on my luggage allowance, the staff were rude…” or the old favourite, “they lost my luggage.” But how often do you hear “I had the best flight ever! I got to the airport and found they had double booked my sea, so they upgraded me to business class with no extra charge and gave me a free pass for the first class lounge. The staff were so friendly it made the whole experience incredible, I’ll definitely fly with them again.” This is an excellent example of how both a customer and the airline perceive a brand. Don’t forget that the customer with the satisfactory experience didn’t go onto mention the details of the flight or who they flew with. It’s only if you deliver excellence with your brand values will they go onto talk about who they flew with. As a rule of thumb those who have either a fantastic or bad experience will go onto tell 10 people. You need to ask yourself, how can I get my staff to understand about brand value  to this level?

Hang on a minute!

You’re thinking he’s not talked about the principals of designing a logo or any other design, surely this is the most important part of a branding process? In my view this isn’t the most important aspect. Once you have a plan for how your brand is to be communicated, hand it across to a skilled design professional. I’m going to burst another bubble; you can’t design your own brand unless you yourself are a branding designer. Even in this case I still would say this is a bad idea as you’re too close to the business. The three Fs being Friends, Family and Fools are also a bad choice for helping you turn your brand values into a logo or give you feedback as they don’t like telling you bad things.

So how did we overcome this problem of designing our own logo? We were in a very fortunate position as we’d just had a new member of staff join our media agency who hadn’t yet been briefed or told about the Eliot Turner brand. He was the perfect choice for turning our brand values / principals into the design equivalent.

I hope this gives you an insight and will make you think carefully about what a brand is really all about. If you are starting your own business, stop sketching out logos and first write down your brand values, then you can think about the design. It’s all too easy to get carried away with the exciting parts of the business such as logo design, but always remember, never forget the basics.

One thing we’ve always been cautious about is how to present the brand and items to the customer upon delivery. Do customers really care how an item is delivered? Does it need to be bagged, boxed and tied?

We recently ran a prize draw where people signed up to win a Swarovski Pearl Jewelery Set. The prize draw went well with hundreds of subscribers. We picked a winner and sent out an email to confirm some personal details before sending the item out.

A few days later, we emailed the winner to make sure they had received the item and that everything was O.K.

Feedback before we asked…

The winner said everything was present and correct with the item and that she couldn’t wait for an occasion to wear it. The winner then offered one piece of advice/feedback.

The item which the winner received was delivered in a gold box, inside of a padded envelope. The box plus the envelope apparently didn’t do the item any justice and the winner was kind enough to say that it should be changed.

Now for us, it isn’t really a problem as we have a minimal amount of the ‘gold boxes’ and were going to change them before the first item was sold on the Eliot Turner website.

Presentation is everything!

We’ve learned an important lesson before the store was up and running. We need to think more clearly about how we present our stock to the consumer, at least we know we’re on the right track with the stock!

Twitter

We’re a pretty social group, we’ve all got Twitter accounts and we usually send out most of our info out via @ecomexperiment, however we have our own @eliot_turner account now and plan become more socially active.

We want to communicate and relate with people about the service we’re providing, telling them about our new stock and quite possibly throw the odd offer around from time to time. We would like people to know we’re there to talk to.

As well as being openly social, we will create dialogue with two types of twitter users; the average user who is our potential customer and those who are influential in our field who can promote our business interests. An authority in our field such as a fashion influence endorsing a link will have much more response than unknown quantity tweeting out links. An influencer’s voice will be respected by our target market. Networking with bloggers, publishers, journalists and other business owners will also create traffic.

When tweeting, we will take in to consideration the quality of tweets and not overwhelm you with links making you switch off.

Also, we will use search.twitter.com to our advantage, identifying users who have searched for anything jewellery related. We will not only be able to gain consumer insight but also establish a relationship with these people and offer them discounts or information about our products.

Email Marketing

As you may already know we have built up a database of around 3000 potential customers via an online prize draw at www.eliotturner.com. Those who have entered were given the option to sign up to our mailing list meaning we have a list of people who we know want to hear about our products. We will send these people emails at our launch promoting our products and any special offers we may have. We will then record those who’ve been responsive to emails and those customers who have bought products and send out questionnaires to these people to learn more about who our target demographic actually is. We can then target specific customers with emails, for example, send only male customers an email with Valentine’s Day offers.

Voucher code websites

We will be placing a voucher offering around 10% off products at Eliot Turner which will bring traffic to the site and hopefully create sales.

Prize draw websites

We will register a prize draw on various prize draw websites which will have an option to subscribe to our email newsletters. This will not only expand our email database but increase awareness of the Eliot Turner brand.

Paid Advertising

Fashion blogs

We plan to place adverts onto fashion blogs such as www.fashionista.com, www.myfashionlife.com and http://fashionblog.dailymail.co.uk. These blogs are influential and receive significant traffic numbers and are likely to be viewed by our target demographic.

Google ad words

Once the site is launched we will place an advert on Google ad words as there is often at least a two month wait for SEO to take effect. Once Eliot Turner appears higher in the search rankings we will amend and reduce spend on our advert.

Competitor analysis involves learning more about the businesses that function around the same target demographic as you enabling you to assess their strengths and weaknesses whilst identifying opportunities and threats to your own business.

Often businesses become obsessed with competitor analysis whilst others can ignore what their competitors are doing completely. A healthy medium would be to track competition, react to changes but focus on your own plans.  After identifying the main competition in the market, it is useful to recognize the threats they pose, their company objectives and strategies and their weaknesses, this can only add to the strength of your own business.

It is useful to create a competitor profile for each of your competitors as it enables you to gather all relevant information in one place allowing you to formulate an effective strategy to implement, monitor and adjust where needed. Competitor profiles include their background, financials, products, marketing, facilities, personnel and corporate and marketing strategies. Knowing your competition’s planned strategies allows you to plan a response through your own strategy whilst at the same time revealing strategic weaknesses.

We have identified accessorize as the main market leader for this type of jewellery, however there are many that sell handmade jewellery offering similar products to Eliot Turner that are certainly market competition.

Here are the ones I have identified as the biggest competition:

The Spotty Dog Shop

Lisa's Handmade Jewellery

FarFallina

Purple Label

Pia Jewellery

Silver Wire Designs

We plan to create competitor profiles for our competition; however, we do not want to concentrate too much on what our competition is doing instead focusing our time and energy on our own plans.

I’ve been trying to keep the design under wraps as much as I could but there always comes a point when you need feedback from other people. So the guys have seen the full design and will be providing feedback over the next couple of days. We’ll be looking into various other ecommerce sites and looking at structure to do with the UX.

But for now, I’ll leave you with a sneak peak of Eliot Turner.

I’m currently working on the “mid” section of the design and will be showing some more sneak peaks very soon. Feedback is more than appreciated even at this very early stage.

This was going to be a video post but time didn’t allow! I’ll be going into more detail about running prize draws and where to submit them later this week.

We now have our domain name online and a prize draw running. Head over to http://www.eliotturner.com to enter and try and win a Handmade Swarovski Silver and Pearl Jewelery Set (Necklace, Bracelet and Ear-ring Set). The prize draw is a world wide prize draw so please pass it around and give it some link love. The only restriction is that it is one entry per person.