We are soon to launch a new ecommerce site called Printed Supplies. The site will feature all kinds of printed items that you might expect to see on a shop-fittings site for example. There will be “for sale” signs, sale tickets, sale showcards or standees and swing tickets, all of which are standard fare for shop-keepers and market stall-holders. We hope to bring these to the market at prices which are very attractive and we will be happy to receive suggestions and requests for any new “titles” or different colours and styles.

 Our Printed Supplies site will include supplies for hotels and guest houses such as “do not disturb” signs and “towel re-use” signs along with any other simple print solutions for hotels. As with our shop supplies section, we will be very pleased to receive requests from hoteliers for other types of signs or printed supplies that are not listed online and we can take requests for bespoke printing.

 Printed floral patterns are one feature of a series of die-cut letters which will be available to fans of cardmaking, scrapbooking and decoupage on our new Printed Supplies ecommerce site. Popular die-cut shapes such as stars and ovals will also be available at attractive prices in our Craft Supplies section.

Even the very existence of our three sites dedicated to pop-up and interactive promotional marketing products will give rise to many creative marketing ideas. The diversity of shapes, sizes, actions and movements will spark off even more ideas for marketing campaigns. In fact, the three sites offer a creative lifeline to marketing professionals who are looking for “Something different”.

 Every product on the Pop-up Mailers site has its own webpage that features suggestions for marketing ideas. The Christmas Marketing site offers ideas for corporate Christmas greetings of many different kinds and the New Promotional Ideas site is arranged in such a way as to help you find that right shape of movement to match your own marketing ideas.

“Advertising, Marketing and Promotional Ideas and News” is the name of our blog. You will find it on this website and you will also discover that it is another useful source of marketing information and marketing ideas. We don’t see ourselves as online publishers of a catalogue. We want to offer a full service in order to become your number one choice for marketing products and ideas. We want you to think of us as a company that you can work with and not just as a company that you buy from. There is a whole world of difference. Trying to help to find a solution to marketing problems is just one way in which we like to help.

We are always on the lookout for products that come to life in our pop-up mailers range that might also be developed as a retail product. A good example is a product that we call Wobbly Heads which is a fun add-on for automatic pop-ups. This product has been developed to form our range of adult humour greeting cards which we call “Wobbly Bits”. These cards feature bellies that wobble, heads that nod and shake and bums that wiggle and each fun movement has a funny picture and caption to match.

We have a very comprehensive range of promotional bottle collars which were developed over a period of months in 2008. During that development stage we created three different style of a product that we thought looked a bit like a bow tie so we called them bottle bows. This product has been developed even further and the result is our range of Bottle Bows that can be seen in wine shops and greeting shops throughout the UK. The Bottle Bows are a gift card / greeting card that sits on the neck of a gift bottle.

 “Wobbly Bits” and “Bottle Bows” are available to buy online from our website that is dedicated to greetings products – “A Nice Touch”. The name came from a casual comment passed in our office when someone saw a sample Bottle Bow on a bottle of wine and said, “Oh, that’s a nice touch”!

The website was our first venture into ecommerce and has proved to be successful, so much so that we intend to expand on the ranges on that site whilst we are also looking at the development possibilities in two other areas with ecommerce possibilities – Pop up Crafts and Printed Supplies – and news will be forthcoming on this website later in the year.

Our entry into the export market export has been well documented on this blog but the efforts to raise awareness in specific areas of the world are an ongoing task.

 It makes sense to put extra effort into trying to build ties with those countries which send most traffic to our websites and our research shows us that the top 6 countries are the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Ireland. In order to generate better links with these countries we have created sub-folders in our whitneywoods.com site and each folder is targeted towards the relevant country through Google Webmaster Tools. Each dedicated sub folder is designed to help would-be visitors to our websites to find us more easily.

 We have also started to run adwords campaigns for each country which can be a bit of a problem when the Ad Sceduling tool is being used. The North American continent covers 4 time zones and so we have had to split up the contitnent into Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific time zones and set the Ad Scheduling clock accordingly. With the USa being behind GMT and Autralia and New Zealand being way ahead of GMT, setting the Ad Scheduling has been a tricky business!

 Early signs indicate that the move into the export business will prove to be a sensible step with export orders already accounting for 17% of sales of promotional pop-up products in the last couple of months.

Whitney Woods was established in February 1992 as a hand-enclosing direct mail business but the hand skills required by that service were soon put to wider use when we started to supply the print industry with eyeletting and hand finishing services in the spring of that year.

Having been established during one recession and survived, we have just had our 17^th anniversary and we are holding our own through the current downturn. This sets us apart from many hand-finishing businesses who are often bullied into working for next to nothing and as a consequence they cut corners, work with inexperienced cheap labour and eventually cock-up and are forced out of business. We have insisted on being paid a fair rate for a job well done and done on time. This hasn’t always endeared us to certain print companies but we are still here when so many other long-established hand finishers and eyeletting businesses are not. We have a reputation for being thorough, supplying good work and a very reliable service.

 The only machines in our factory are paper drills and eyeletting machines, so apart from drilling and eyeletting, every job is done totally by hand. Even the eyeletting machines are hand-operated and are best-suited to the assembly of information discs, parking discs and wheel charts. We actually produce millions of discs like this each year – all on hand-operated bench top machines. We can handle orders of 250 to over 250,000. We also eyelet tags, swing tickets and luggage labels and there are many rather unusual eyeletting application, too. Eyelets are occasionally used as a binding tool; they are used to capture elastic in some applications and at other times they might be purely decorative. Whatever the eyeletting application, Whitney Woods is happy to look at the job.

 When we talk about hand finishing there are a number of functions that could apply to the term. We still do a lot of hand collations prior to drilling and inserting into ring binders. We do a lot of hand gluing, from spot gluing to making up pockets in capacity folders to hot melt gluing cartons and so on. We do a lot of hand inserting such as making up information packs, handling direct mail and putting loose inserts into wallets etc. To see the full range of services on offer we recommend that you visit our dedicated hand-finishing website.