I must apologise for being ever so tardy with my blog posts. I've been running around flat out for months now and when I do seem to pause for a moment or two, I find myself unable to put two words together, such is the state of my mental impairment! :)

Enough of the excuses though. - I'll just try to do better from now on....

I am continuing to onboard fabrics on our online store from some of our other premier suppliers. You may have noticed the sudden jump in the number of products we list, and I am now proud to boast that we have nearly 60,000 fabrics, trimmings and wallcoverings on the store.

.. I might be wrong but I think that might well make us the largest online catalogue of drapery and upholstery fabrics anywhere in the world!?! And I'm not finished!

Behind the scenes I've been sinking a lot of time into categorising fabrics by colour and pattern. With 30,000 fabrics added to our catalogue this has literally been making me go cross-eyed. Apologies in advance if I have mis-categorised any. Hopefully, I've got the classifications correct but I must admit I'm more than a little jaded by the whole thing. .. Still, I would like to think its one of those things that only needs to be done once and then tweaked over time.

When I'm not tied up by our online store, I've been hard at work with the team out on the factory floor. This month seems to be 'Austrian Blind' month, and I can tell you, I have beautiful bruises coming up on my knees from jumping up and down from the tables on our factory floor. .. 'Austrian's are fiddly (but beautiful).'

A quick heads-up to keep a lookout for yet more fabrics on our store. We are perhaps only a couple of weeks away from another 10-15,000 fabrics.

Well, enough for now. I'm determined from now on to create a blog post more frequently .. Even if I haven't got something remotely interesting to say.

Bye for now!

Nancy :)

A very big ' Thank you' to our wonderful customers who left such wonderful reviews for us. We have just been awarded the Best of Houzz 2017 Service Award from the Houzz Australia folk. This is the second consecutive year in a row we have been given this prestigious award and we are so thrilled.

... So a very big thank you to all our wonderful customers for providing feedback on our performance. We wouldn't have won without your help and support and are so pleased that we were able to provide you all with the sort of product and service you have come to expect from us.

I had a fascinating conversation with a customer yesterday. When the cows come home they have to be milked twice a day. I nearly fell over when I found out that the average cow produces around 30 litres of milk with the 'big mumma's' producing up to 60 litres. ... 'Greedy little calfs!' ... Like WOW!

The poor dairy farmer has to sell all the milk the calf's don't drink for only 16c a litre (which incidentally is the same price they were getting 5 years ago from the supermarkets) ... So think twice before buying the discounted milk. The dairy farmers will thank you! - Their life is hard enough as it is, for example their electricity bill alone can be a more than $40,000 or more in electricity to keep those nipples squirting.

Apologies again for having to wait so long for this installment. We have well and truly moved into the pre-Xmas rush, so we are literally working 6 x10 days at the factory and with our current Warwick and Charles Parsons promotions on the store a huge success with daily orders rolling in. We haven't cut off yet with our drapery manufacturing but will be doing so in the next few weeks along with most of the Window Treatment Manufacturers out there.

On the frustrating side, I've been working hard at on-boarding another 11,000 products into the online store. - Just when we think we have the product presentation right, we run into a hiccup with the formatting. I'm holding my breath and I don't want to jinx it but I'm hoping to have the product finally displayed on the store in the next couple of weeks. It's taken 3 months working with the data and I am so frustrated we still haven't got the latest brands live yet. - So keep your fingers and toes crossed. ... I'm doing the same (even though I keep falling over!

Well, enough for now. I've got to jump on a table and do some Romans. .... Let me rephrase. .. I have to make some Roman Blinds!

Till next time.

Nancy

There just are not enough hours in the day. I need a recipe for cloning myself and another six of me would really make things happen just that little bit faster!

It's exciting times at the moment for the entire family and team at Ideal Drape Makers. With our shop launched only a few short months ago, we are quite frankly astounded with how well it is being received. With 20,000 products it's starting to attract quite some traffic and it is so pleasing to see a vision realised in such a tangible way.

One of the most important and, at times, time consuming elements of purchasing custom made drapery solutions is fabric selection. It's impossible for any retailer to carry all swatches of all fabrics, try as best we may, to have everything for everybody. The vision for the store was to bring all the choices together so that visitors could compare and make informed decisions, not only about what choices they have, but also the ability to order cuttings so that they are able to go on more than a mere photograph, while at the same time being able to 'touch and feel' their shortlisted candidates via our cutting service, which to be fair full credit is due with the fabric houses whose brands we represent on the site and who offer free cuttings as part of their superior service.

Thank you to all those who have dropped us a line, to say how much they appreciate the site and to all our new customers who have purchased fabrics from us.

Thank you also to the many brands and the distributors behind those brands who have really made this site possible.

I'm busting at the britches to tell you all what's next with regard new brands and products which will be added to the store shortly. I've promised myself that I won't let too much on; mainly because the preparation of the new items to our catalogue is painfully slow and fraught with delays and if I was to announce details now, I would risk disappointing you, if our scheduled release of the expanded catalogue is delayed. ...

... How was that for a tease? :))

If you haven't seen the store yet you can find it at the following url:

We have started writing a special FAQ for the store and although we have a mailing list, I have yet to create a separate form for our newsletter signup. They are all on our todolist.... Just some of the not so minor things that are very much on our todolist.

Until next time...

In my last blog entry I complained that I seemed to be losing time. I promised myself I would blog more regularly; and I've sat down tonight with that intention, only to discover once more, that its been just over a month since my last entry. OMG!

I'm finding a pattern to most of my activities these days. I'm well in truly in the routine of spending enormous hours with the store to the chagrin of my hubby, who although supportive, rarely gets more than a grunt out of me when I am at home. When I'm at home it's all about the store. When I'm at the factory it's all about our manufacturing operations. Somewhere in among all that I'm preparing quotes and talking with our valued clients. It's exhausting, but at the same time exciting.

The store has taken on a life of it's own and I have been receiving wonderful feedback from users. There is still so much to be done. I've had to become an instant expert at identifying patterns so that I can classify the 20,000 swatches we currently have on the store. In many ways I feel I'm chipping away with an ice-pick at an iceberg and I'm counting on the fact that in the end that my persistence will pay off.

If you have joined the growing ranks of the regular repeat visitors, you will no doubt have noted that the colour filter has bloated out. - We have gone from around 30 colours to around 70. This was necessary because a lot of the swatches we were importing into the store were poorly colour categorised, or not categorised at all. I spent many many hours going through the swatches and manually assigning a colour so that they would work well in the filter, but the sheer volume of swatches I had yet to process was vast. I was also finding that after several hours of non-stop colour classification, I was starting to see blues as greens and reds as pinks etc.

The good news is I found a solution to the problem. It's not perfect, but it is fascinating. The colours are now scanned by computer and classified by the CCS colour pallet. This colour pallet is much larger (around 140 colours) but it was able to tear through the 8,000 or so swatches, I had yet to classify, in a matter of hours. I'm still manually classifying colours but I'm now using some pretty cool technology to help me. Of course, I'm going to have to make many corrections. - The computer doesn't always get it right and in the end I need to reduce the total colours that are listed in the filter, but I'm going to wait till we get the majority of our swatches on board before I start consolidating colours.

That brings me on to the next bit of news. - I figure I had better mention it now, lest another month goes by and I get complaints that I should have announced it before the event.

Stay tuned over the next week or so. We will almost double the number of swatches which should bring the total number of swatches on the store to almost 40,000! ... I, for one, am hanging out to see how well the filters work with such a large inventory. The filters are about doing the heavy-lifting out of selecting fabrics, wall coverings and trimmings, reducing the candidate swatches for your projects to a manageable number.

Of course, the amount of re-classification, consolidation etc yet to be done will grow exponentially, so apologies in advance if not all the swatches are classified perfectly when the new brands are on-boarded.

I'm preparing the swatches in the background as I write. Watching them flash past me as I append the brand logos to them. We've got some great products about to go live in the next week ... so 'watch this space' as they say. .. Oh and please forgive me if I don't always get my pattern classifying spot on. I learned what a 'diaper' pattern and a 'foulard' pattern were this week (or at least I think I have them sussed out) ... I have so many patterns I have yet to assign. For each named pattern I literally scroll through every swatch and assign them one by one as I move through the inventory.. In a week, it's going to take me quite a while to work through 40,000 swatches! .. I take some small solace in the notion that provided I do a reasonable job; it is a job that will only need to be done once. ... Here's hoping that's true.

Well, this blog entry is way too long. I've once again been remiss about reporting on work at the factory and all the great clients we have been working with. ... Perhaps next time, though, to be fair, I'm a little bit myopic when it comes to the store at the moment. It's taken on a life of its own and I'm happy to stoke the coals and watch the fire take hold!

Until next time...

Nancy :))

Has it really been a month since my last post. Oh dear! .. It seems like only a couple of weeks. :(

(Picture: Me deep in thought.. not many moments when I get a chance to stop and ponder things..... ok.. so it's not me... gotta love stock photography!)

I'm working 7 days a week. During the day I'm at the factory taking care of business, cutting fabric, climbing all over the tables and giving myself some really great bruises. At night, I'm doing quotes and getting back to people; and then, of course, there is our new eCommerce store.

When last I wrote, we had an inventory of 10,000 fabric swatches. Today I'm pleased to report that we have 15,000 with the Warwick Fabrics lineup being added a couple of weeks ago. .

It's almost old news now as I will hopefully be adding another 7,000 products in the coming week. Boy oh boy!.... This store has been a year in the planning and the amount of stress and anxiety, let alone the expense of it all, has been something I wouldn't wish on anybody. Nevertheless, my vision for a one stop shop for people to search for, compare and select fabric is slowly coming to pass.

What has been really pleasing has been the response from people who have stumbled upon the store. Many are visiting for more than an hour which is exceptional compared to the stats we get off our static store. I say people who have 'stumbled' upon us as we are not promoting the shop heavily yet. ... We are lying low, tuning the store and waiting for Google to crawl and index us so that people will be able to find us. The fact that we are getting almost the same amount of store traffic in a day as opposed to the visits our static site receives in a month, has me doing cartwheels through the factory (which only adds to the bruises)

So apologies if I haven't been as regular with updates as I had originally intended. I'll try to up the frequency a bit from here on in.

If you haven't seen the shop yet, turn your browsers to:

Until next time!

Nancy :))

When I last wrote I was pulling my hair out with anxiety and frustration. Things were moving along but not fast enough.

Well, without any fanfare, I'm now pleased to announce that our shop is live. In actual fact it went live a little over a week ago! .. We haven't made much of a song and a dance about it, preferring a 'soft launch' approach during which we don't actively promote the store, until we get all the bugs ironed out and the windows all shiny and sparkling.

We have over 10,000 swatches now and are continuing to work around the clock at preparing more product to be listed. With only a tiny handful of our pages indexed by the search engines as I write, I'm amazed that anyone has found us at all. - Yet, we are already receiving orders which is giving us a great 'trial by fire' of the back-end processes we have only just developed to handle orders.

Fortunately, our back-end processes, with a minor adjustment here and there, seem to be holding up well. Phew!

Oh my goodness. Some lessons can't be learned, they have to be 'experienced' - I'd certainly put opening an eCommerce store into that category!

Off to do some more late night graphics work. I'm not happy with the carousel images which are downright boring at the moment.

Be sure to checkout the store at https://shop.idealdrapemakers.com.au

Till next time..

Nancy :)

I've been working around the clock and while I am prone to getting frustrated that our shop isn't quite opened yet, I'm nevertheless very pleased with progress. With shop.idealdrapemakers.com.au will be live within about 2 weeks. - We are hoping to make a real splash as I think I can safely say that our shop will have the largest selection of Drapery, Upholstery, Wall Coverings and Trim in Australia.

Most of the time now is being spent with getting the products assigned to the correct categories. In conjunction with the dynamic filter technology we are hoping that the site will become popular for those selecting soft-furnishing textiles, trims and wall coverings.

I have also spent considerable time working with a developer with my little black book of secret drapery formulas to ensure that our new fabric estimator is accurate and will take a lot of the guesswork out of ensuring that those looking to purchase fabrics, only purchase what they need.

Keep your eye on our main site for links to the store once it is launched. I've been noodling away with my graphics program trying to come up with the right icon for the link. ... Then I'll be plastering it all over the site.

Until next time... I'M SO EXCITED!

Nancy :))

Well, it's been quite a while in the making, but I'm hopeful that we will be able to go live with our new online store within about two weeks. So far we've loaded 8000 products and with any luck we should have another 2000 when we launch, taking the total to over 10,000 products.

Our new store has been a year in the making and will go a long way toward completing my vision to create a place where users , can search for, filter, refine and compare soft furnishing fabrics and trimmings from Australia's leading textile brands.

I'm hoping that through the use of our filtering technology many will find the site a useful resource, affording them the ability to save their selections directly to ideabooks on Houzz, to Pinterest boards or on the store itself as a wishlist.

I'm also excited about a new drapery fabric calculator we have developed. We had a look around at a lot of the existing fabric calculators on the web and thought we could do better. The calculator will be a handy tool to use while viewing swatches on the store .

Keep your eyes on our website for the shop links which I will setup once the store goes live. We are very very close now to opening the store ... Finally a light at the end of a very long tunnel!

Nancy