Stranger in a Strange Land

Flashback to June 2006

About a month before we opened we figured we had better get a logo and an espadrille website sorted out. Aich creative came up with half a dozen concepts for our branding and after a few adjustments we were ready to go. Now all we needed to do was design our spanky new site. To start off we figured we shouldn’t open an online store immediately and should just concentrate on the shop. We therefore decided that the site we needed would be for information only. Dr Aich was very up front about the different options we had and how if we were ever thinking of launching an e-store we really would be better off building it now. The downside of this approach was the cost, which was about 3 times the information only site. So, despite repeated warnings we decided to go with the cheapest option.

Now the result of this decision you’ve probably already guessed. The ‘information’ only site was pretty much a waste of time. Don’t get me wrong, Dr Aich did a very good job and the site looked great, however, the most frequent comment we got was “so, how do I buy online?”. After about 6 months, when we’d missed out on the buoyant Christmas season of 2006, we went back and asked what would be involved in converting our site to an e-store and were not surprisingly told that there really wasn’t a conversion option and we’d have to start over. Dr Aich had been right along.

e-retailtherapy Fact No 1: Listen to the expert you’ve paid to give you advice.

e-retailtherapy Fact No 2: Investing in the right thing up front is far cheaper than trying to reverse engineer it later.