My online home for the last three years has been Etsy (www.etsy.com), a handmade business supporting website that acts as a marketplace to kickstart small enterprises. I couldn't be happier with Etsy, they have helped the growth of Darwin & Gray enormously and just from looking at my statistics I can see regularly that I get a reasonable amount of digital footfall from their viewers that just so happened to have stumbled across my shop through Etsy's search engines. As much as I love being a part of the Etsy community, I, along with a vast percentage of Etsy users (according to their own statistics) state that their goal is to open an independent website for their company.
So, where do I begin? I scribbled down the pros and cons to every website hosting platform possible when searching the internet. Through personal experience and the fact that I have multiple people that I can turn to for help regarding this website, I went for Shopify. Shopify is an online hosting platform, they have themes and easy design tools to assist you in the creation of your site. I personally didn't want anything
too fancy or in-your-face for Darwin & Gray, especially as this is my first website and I didn't want to over complicate the process for myself to begin with.
Having been on a trial for 14 days to test my images and content in a website format, I was satisfied enough with the outcome to sign on a monthly contract costing roughly £18-£20 a month along with the transaction fees that will correspond to the amount of sales processed. In comparison with Etsy, the transaction fee is slightly less but the fact that you pay a fee to be on Shopify every month boosts the expenses going out, I personally feel that it is worth it though to have my own independent space of the internet to call my own.
Using the domain I have owned several years, I transferred all of the relevant codes to ensure that
www.darwinandgray.com is linked to my website and no longer my blog which has now (for the time been) gone back to www.darwinandgray.blogspot.com. Within the online store is its own blog, I intend to create the idea of a 'lifestyle' brand through this blog, including everything from recipes to crafty tutorials as well as day trips especially out and about in Derbyshire and Yorkshire in which Darwin & Gray is based. Through my internet awareness I have learnt that consumers are far more drawn into brands that have a back story, that are relatable and above all else have a
real person communicating with them.
T H E L A U N C H .
Having closed my shop over a month ago I have been attempting to create a bit of a buzz about the relaunch of Darwin & Gray, part of this has been through beginning a newsletter that will be sent out monthly with little snippets about the brand, offers and exclusive content. The first newsletter to be sent out on Sunday 1st May contains a secret password that allows anybody that has signed up to enter the website 24hrs before everybody else.
The public launch follows this at 8pm on Monday 2nd May.
