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29
Feb

Bella’s Bracelet Price Increase

categories Bella's Bracelet    

It’s been a bit of time since I last posted to this blog.  There’s been a lot going on that has kept me pretty busy.  However, I think it’s important to bring up a topic that is probably going to be very distasteful to many, and might even cause a certain amount of "encouraging e-mails" to flow my way.  It’s just that there’s no way to avoid what we must do.

Because of several factors, we find ourselves in a position where we need to raise the price from $65.00 to $75.00 in order to maintain our ability to produce it.  There’s simply no way around this.  We hate that we have to do it, but we are left with no choice.

While Twilight Teez is not a jeweler, the company that we have contracted with to make the bracelet is very much so.  Their costs for the raw materials needed for the bracelet have increased, which gets passed on to us.  We try to absorb as much of the cost increases as we can, but there comes a time when it is not financially feasible for us to do so and still be able to provide the product.  This has happened here.

On February 1 of this year, the Swarovski company has increased the prices for their crystal by 6%.  This increase directly affected our costs in manufacturing the bracelet.  On top of this, the cost of silver has just about doubled in the last three months alone.  While we were able to absorb the first two increases that we experienced since December, this last one has pushed our costs to a point where we simply can not afford to keep the price of the bracelet at $65.00.

So, effective March 8, 2008, we are increasing the price of Bella’s Bracelet from $65.00 to $75.00.  We know that this will be discouraging for many of our customers, and we regret that we must bring about this increase.  But as I’ve stated before, we simply have no other choice at this time.  If you have any questions, please use our contact us form to get in touch with us, or post a comment here.  I will attempt to answer as many questions as possible.

Questions in the oh-so-popular Q and A format:

If I buy the bracelet before March 8, will I pay $65.00 or $75.00?

You will pay the price that is listed on the product page at the time of your purchase.  If you buy the bracelet before March 8, then you will pay $65.00.  If you buy the bracelet after March 8, you will pay $75.00.

If you have the bracelet in your shopping cart before March 8, but do not actually place your order until after, then you will be charged $75.00 for the bracelet.

-Brian

18
Feb

They’re On Their Way!

categories Shirts and stuff, Stephenie Meyer, The Store    

Many of you have been asking for them.  You have been wondering when they’ll be here.  And now, we can finally tell you, they are on their way!

We are talking, of course, about the latest recordings from Barry Manilow!

Ha Ha!  I love a good joke.  Okay, seriously, we’re talking about the new character slogan t-shirts.  Remember the slogan contest held by Stephenie back in October?  The winners were announced in the early part of November, and now we can finally say we are nearly ready to make them available for sale to you.  We have three of the five designs in production right now, and the other two are in line to get made just as soon as we can finalize the character shirt colors.  However, all graphics have been approved, and we are very close to putting them on the site.  We are so excited about this that we can barely contain ourselves.  Excuse me while I go use the bathroom.

Okay, so you have some questions about these shirts, right?  And I’m going to attempt to answer some of those questions right now, using the popular "Q and A" format.  What makes me think this is a popular format to use?  The fact that I’m too lazy to write in any other way comes to mind.

Q. For which characters are you making shirts and what are their slogans/images/colors?

A. We are making shirts for all five slogans that were featured in the contest.  The characters and their slogans are as follows:

Q. What?  Where is the shirt for Rosalie?

A.  We are only making the character slogan shirts for characters in the contest.  Rosalie was not included in that set.  We know many of you have a huge crush on Rosalie, especially the guys, because, let’s face it, she’s hot.  Efforts to make a Rosalie shirt or shirts for other characters from the first Twilight book may be slowed because of the contract for the movie, but we will see what can be arranged.

Q. The contest was held in October 2007, and it’s now February 2008; why did it take so long to get the shirts made?

A. Despite the fact that we sell internationally, and the fact that we have a fairly professional site with a lot of cool graphics and stuff, one must remember that we are only a two-person operation.  On the best days, we have four or five people total, including our CEO/MIC Sharon and myself.  This is a lot of work for such a small company.

First, the contest was held right before the biggest holiday season of the year.  For four weeks, we did more business than we had done in the entire 11 months previous.  It took everything we had, and then some, to maintain our sanity and get orders fulfilled in time for Christmas.  We were dealing with 200 orders a day.  Needless to say, new projects had to be put on the back burner for a bit.

Second, we introduced a product that turned out to be far more popular than we had expected.  Bella’s Bracelet was put on a pre-order status in late November.  In the first 6 weeks alone, we had over 1,500 orders for just the bracelet.  When the bracelets finally came in from manufacturing in early January, all efforts were put into fulfilling orders.  Again, all other projects had to be put on hold.

By the end of January, we were finally able to devote our time to new projects.  It took about two weeks to get the new slogans matched up with graphics and get them approved by Stephenie.  So it’s with a great excitement that we can now say three of the five designs are in for manufacturing, with the other two following very shortly.

Q. When will they be up for sale?

A. We hope to have the first three designs available for sale sometime during the week beginning February 25th.  Don’t read that to mean that you will see the shirts on that very day!  What I mean by that is sometime during that week, we expect to have the shirts up.  It might be that day, it might be sooner.  I don’t want to get e-mails on the 25th saying "How come the shirts aren’t up you said they’d be up by now."  I am not saying they will be up on February 25th.  I am saying we HOPE to have them available sometime during that week.

Q. Speaking of e-mails that are poorly written, what do you think of messages that are written with no merit given to punctuation or spelling?

A. I hate them, but that’s a topic for my personal blog.

Q. How much will the new shirts cost?

A. The prices for the shirts will remain in line with all of our other products.  The price will range between $18.00 and $21.00 depending on the size.

Q. Do you have any other information about the new shirts?

A. Only that if there are any other questions, please use our contact us form or the comments section for this post.  If the questions are frequent or relevent enough, I will add them to this Q and A.

-Brian

14
Feb

Happy Valentine’s Day!

categories Uncategorized    

Bella Swan Heart

Make your own candy heart images at

The Candy Heart Generator.

1
Feb

Playin’ With The Blog

categories Twilight Books    

Some of you may have noticed that things keep changing on the blog, here (and on the regular web site, too).  There’s a simple reason for that; I keep playing around with stuff.  Our blog software is WordPress, available for free from WordPress.org (you can set up your own WordPress blog on WordPress.com).  The Problem with WordPress is that there are so many templates that you can use with the software, and it’s incredibly easy to plug these templates into the software.  So I browse these templates and find a few I like and I play around with them.  That’s why you’re seeing stuff change on a regular basis here.

This last change was born out of necessity, though.  Turns out my previous template was not compatible with my anti-spam-comment plug-in.  This explains why nobody was able to comment.  No matter what comments you typed, they got eaten by the spam filter.  They weren’t even saved into a moderation holding area.  Just ate.  So I had to make a change…again.  This new template is pretty nice, though I’ll have to fix things up a bit to match the theme of the main web site, I think.  But the important thing is you can comment again.  I do apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced earlier.  We weren’t ignoring you, and we didn’t purposely set it up so you couldn’t comment.  I hope I got everything fixed, this time.  Please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any problems with any portions of our site, including the blog or the forums.

-Brian