First of all I would like to wish you a Happy New year, may it bring happiness and opportunity. Like Celtmyth our sister shop, here at Mug Shop we have a number of exciting developments that are going to take place this year. The biggest is the transfer of Tredegar House and the associated Craft Workshops to the National Trust who have taken a 50 year lease on estate. Visitor numbers are expected to treble in the summer because of this so we are revamping the retail side of the shop in preparation. So if you do visit the wonderful Tredegar House please pop on over to the Craft workshops and have a look around.
So what is on the cards for the year ahead?
Well quite a lot really, in fact so much I am going to have to cherry pick them as I don’t want to go on for too long. Firstly we are going to be offering all our existing designs out for franchise. What this effectively means is that we are going to contract with selected suppliers around the world who will offer our mug designs on their websites. When an order is placed we create the design for them (be it personalised mugs or non personalised) and send it to them so that they can fulfill the production side and put it onto the mug.
In addition to this we will still be focusing on the important detail of creating more designs and offering more services. The launch of our Mug of the Month award in October has gone down really well, so much so that we have decided to create a Become a Designer scheme off the back of it. The scheme allows you to submit a mug design to us, or several, and if we think it is good enough we will add it to our online catalog. When someone buys a mug with the your design on, you will receive £1 if your design is personalised, 70p for a non personalised designs and £1.30 for photo mug designs, which roughly equated to a 10% commission. So if you think you have a good design, send it to us and we will do the rest.
As for new designs the list is quite long but here are a few we have on the drawing board. On the personalised side we have hibiscus surfboards, cupcakes, rainbows, wax crayons and a you are here world map design. We are also adding a Keep Calm range which will have personalised mug variations as well as standard mug designs. On the business mug side we will be creating a similar template service as offered with our design your own mug service. The difference between the two services will be that the business mugs section will offer quantity price breaks.
Finally we will be adding a few new variations of mugs to the website with the introduction of Wow mugs which change colour as you pour hot water into them, as well as porcelain and glass mug options on certain designs.
So its going to be something of a fun and busy year.
Cheers
Brinley
