One word 'Trustpilot'

One word ‘Trustpilot’. Wow, what a boost it has been to my business (and my ego). I have been saying for a very long time that many of the product reviews I receive sound more like a review of me than the product and that it would be good if people could submit a review of the business rather than an individual item and then I discovered Trustpilot. A customer wrote a lovely review on there and sometime later I spoke to my website guy about the possibility of adding this to my website. He said that it was possible and then began sorting it out. Unfortunately, at that time I lost my elder brother and didn’t feel able to concentrate on anything new so we shelved the idea. However, a few weeks later Trustpilot was set up as a widget on my website and the five star reviews starting appearing. It has been amazing and I am delighted with the amount of reviews I have received. I read and reply to each and every one, I have been told that I don’t need to but I want to! I am extremely grateful for them all.

Trustpilot really has increased my sales and shown me that I clearly need to do more advertising but in order to do that I need more time and that’s what I have been working towards all year. I finally feel that I am getting somewhere but it is so strange to not have any stick insects. I have kept stick insects almost all my life, my first stick insects came from Harrods when I was about 10 years old. I have cut out all the bugs that take daily care and am concentrating on spiders, scorpions, millipedes, cockroaches and anything unusual that does not feed on plants. I am looking forward to the AES exhibition at the end of the month, hopefully there will be plenty of new creatures and as ever I will be walking around with my extensive shopping list and famous clip board J Please do say hello if you spot me.

It is now only 18 months until I receive a pension and I can technically retire but I have decided that retirement doesn’t sound like much fun to me, unless I win the lottery, in which case I will give away my collection and take off around the world visiting beautiful countries with amazing animals. Failing that, I will have to keep going because I have many long-term projects on the go. I have some wonderful tarantulas and scorpions that I hope to mate in the future, it is a slow process waiting for them to grow but it is so exciting when I am successful. I think everything is cute when it’s a baby J I was excited to find that my Leatherleaf slugs had produced young this week, I haven’t bred them before.

Enough of the bug room, I have seen some lovely British bugs this summer. Many of them presented to me at my front door! It seems to have been a good year for Hawkmoths, just a few weeks ago my neighbours opposite found some Large Elephant hawkmoth caterpillars on their fuchsia bush. I put a photo on Facebook and said that I would explain why they are so special to me in my next blog post. So, many moons ago when I was a teenage mum, living away from home, with absolutely no money. I used to endlessly walk around Mitcham common in Surrey with my baby and dog, Suki. I would simply enjoy the wonderful array of plants and animals and it always thrilled me to see the Elephant Hawkmoth caterpillars waving on the tall Rosebay Willowherb plants. I became very good at spotting them from a distance. There were both the brown form and the rarer green form. I would bring some home and rear them up for the following year, when I would release them on the common. The adults are the most beautiful pink colour, they still thrill me and I have kept my neighbours caterpillars (now pupae) to show my grandson Bob next spring when they hatch. Bob will be four this month, he is having a robot themed party, perhaps he will want a bug themed one next year? There are certainly a lot of giant house spiders around at this time of year and I am always happy to relocate them from local homes. Just yesterday a friend was keen for me to grab the spider from her kitchen and release him into the garden. They are of course perfectly harmless, it is a shame so many people are scared of spiders. I gave my young physio guy a couple of tarantula moulted skins last week, he was so excited and said it was the strangest present he had ever received. Not strange in my house, believe me, nobody else opens any of my parcels J

Moving forwards, I need to do more advertising, I know that Facebook is good, I have heard that Preloved is perhaps somewhere I could try. If you have any ideas please let me know. I clearly need to write more frequent blog posts, I cannot see who reads my blog but I can see how many times it is viewed and it’s interesting to see that people often read my blog in batches so not just the current entry. Some of my entries have been viewed over 3,000 times! Pretty impressive I think but I still feel that writing a blog is rather self-indulgent. I suppose I shouldn’t worry, nobody is forced to read it J

Photo: A tarantula waving :)