Virginia Cheeseman Blog

The wedding was amazing. We were so lucky with the weather, the day before the wedding everywhere was flooded in our area and the day after it rained quite a bit but Friday 19th August was sunny and warm. Everything went brilliantly, the bride looked stunning and I have never seen our son so happy. They bought me an acre of the Ecuador rain forest as my "mother of the groom" present, what a lovely, thoughtful gift. I won't fill up the blog with stories of our son's wedding (although I have lots of stories and I easily could). They are now honeymooning on an island off of Zanzibar. Alex rang yesterday to say there were giant Train millipedes roaming around, he was delighted to see them in the wild but his new bride was not so happy. I could hear her in the background shouting that I should have gone instead of her, well I did offer to go along but got a rude reply from my son. It seems ages since my last blog, it is two weeks and I am writing this one a day early beca...

Where to start? What a nice week, lots of orders, lots of lovely emails. What a difference a couple of weeks make. I worked out recently that next year will be my 30th anniversary, I will have been running my business for a whole 30 years! I realise that many of you reading this weren't born when I started, I have had several people mention recently that they bought bugs from me as a child and now they are buying them for their own children. I think this is really lovely but I have been seriously looking at other options lately. I need to improve my sales to work ratio if I am to keep going. Nobody can sustain working long hours for so little money, however much I love the bugs (and my customers). I feel I am at last on the right track. The newsletter has certainly been well received, I've had lots of positive feedback. The half price postage offer has gone down well but I would tweak it a little next time. I really should have set the minimum spend a little higher for this off...

Don't mention the postal discount code! What a fiasco, but before I go on with my moans it is sorted now! I sent my very first newsletter on Monday 1st August, initially all seemed to be going well but the admin side of my site continued to say 'sending newsletter' until lunch time which certainly didn't seem right. My website guy was out so I decided to cancel the application. Unfortunately I had no way of telling if the newsletter had been sent to everyone and my website was then on a go slow for the rest of the day. Each time I tried to update something it kept stopping or jumping pages. Monday is generally my busiest day and being the beginning of the month (it seems quite a few people get paid at this time) I had more orders than usual. It was a very stressful day but as it turns out, only the beginning. From Monday to Wednesday there were numerous problems with the discount code. Unbeknown to me and my website guy, although my site is set up to accept a percentage...