In order to bring you the best prices for our unique lines of fashion accessories, we’ve re-ordered some of our best selling lines in large numbers at a reduced rate. Many necklaces in our catalogue have dropped by as much as 40%. For example, item number 60627 is now only £3.76, down from £5.77 – a huge discount.

We have a small number of new fashion bracelets available today. These are cheap items, at the lower end of the price scale, with a recommended retail price of £4 – £7.

Things are tough for retailers in the UK right now, especially for jewellery retailers. Money is tight all around, and the temptation is always there to cut costs by buying cheaper stock. For jewellery and fashion accessory shops, this can be fatal.

The fashion accessory market rises and falls with the economy. Many small businesses will die before things pick back up and consumers begin spending again. So how should you combat this? What should you do?

The key to surviving and even thriving in a tough economy when selling what many perceive to be luxury items is not to work harder, but to work smarter. You need to work out where your real profits lie and invest in those items. Turnover is not profit. Number of items sold is not profit. A busy twelve hour day is not profit. You could be working fourteen hour days, seven days a week, selling lots of necklaces and bracelets, and still find yourself close to the edge and on the brink of closing down.

Our experience with jewellery and accessory retailers in the UK and across Europe has been that the segment that best survives turbulent economic times is the one that targets the middle of the road customer – the customer who doesn’t want cheap plastic accessories and stays away from expensive metals and stones. The £20-£40 customer, not the £4-£6 customer.

Though we do sell some cheap lines that would suit those on a lower budget, our best customers are still buying necklaces that we wholesale for £4-£6, and they are still buying these in large numbers. Don’t fall into the cost cutting trap of buying from the bottom of the catalogue, because if you do you’re likely to stay in that market, and you’ll be competing against pound shops and chain stores for the customers with the least amount of money. Not somewhere you want to be when spending is down.

Our fashion accessories encompass necklaces, bracelets, fashion rings, scarves and watches, and most of these items are strong sellers that command strong prices.

From February 2011, we will be offering reduced delivery rates to many European countries. Our new standard rate for all deliveries to Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden  is now £15.95 + VAT. Other European countries remain at the old rate of £31.

These changes are due to lower priced road services offered by DHL.

We are closing for Christmas and New Year on Friday, 17th December, and will not re-open until Wednesday, January 12th. Our website will still be operational, so you can place any orders you wish during this time, but they will not be processed until we re-open in January. As our offices will be closed for these weeks, we have temporarily switched off telephone ordering, so all orders made must be paid for by credit card or PayPal.

We’d like to wish all our customers a prosperous Christmas, and we look forward to doing further business with you in 2011.

Over the past few months we’ve been trialing a second courier company to ship our orders alongside DHL. This allowed us to considerably reduce our number of remote areas, thereby lowering the shipping costs charged to many customers in these areas. Unfortunately, this company has not lived up to expectations, and as a result, all orders will again be shipped via DHL.

This means that we have had to increase our number of remote areas, which now encompass much of the Highland areas of Scotland as well as a small number of postcodes in Northern England and Wales. A surcharge is added for deliveries to these areas once you enter your postcode on the checkout page.

Anyone who has attempted to contact us by phone in the past week will have found themselves unable to do so. The recent weather conditions across the UK and Ireland have caused problems, which include our telephone lines going down.

Unfortunately, it’s a major structural problem that is taking some time to fix – not helped by the ongoing bad weather. In the mean time, please contact us by email or by using the contact form on our website.

This does not impact our dispatch process, which is still as fast as ever. Orders placed and paid for online are being processed and shipped as expected. Customers who wish to pay by phone may encounter some delays. If you fall into this category, you can speed up the order process by using our online credit card or PayPal payment options, eliminating the need to phone us.

Thanks for your patience.

EDIT: The problem has now been rectified.

All of our Christmas stock is now ready. This year we have over 1,000 styles available – all strong sellers that you will not find at any other wholesaler. This includes a large selection of new watches (RRP £25-£35) and hair accessories (RRP£20-£30), all of which come boxed and make for ideal Christmas gifts.

The Christmas preparation has already begun, with many retailers placing large orders from earlier in the month. We expect it to get busier over the coming weeks, and this may impact on processing and deliver times. To ensure delivery when you need it, please order as far in advance as possible. If you choose to pay by phone instead of credit card or PayPal, your order will take a couple of days longer to process.

I’d also like to remind customers to keep a close watch on our best sellers page. Everything that appears on this page is in danger of selling out. So if you see something you like, buy it now – because it will be sold out next month. And when it’s sold out, it will not be restocked this side of Christmas.

Irish customers may have noticed that shipping charges have dropped to £7.40.  This is due to a change in our shipping agent for Irish routes which came with a lower tariff. This new rate applies to Northern as well as Southern Ireland. Free shipping still applies to orders above £200 or €200.

A few days ago, we went live with our latest stock update, consisting of a large selection of colourful necklaces and bracelets. These lines are all new and unique, though some of them are similar in style to best selling lines of the past six months.

Finished to an excellent standard, we expect many of these lines to sell very quickly, as retailers begin to stock up in earnest for the Christmas period.

Anyone who has been keeping an eye on our bestsellers page will know just how quickly popular lines can sell out,  so if you see anything you like amongst the new stock, don’t count it to still being available in November.