Southern Marine - Just 1 day to go

 

Hello !
 

1 day to Launch ! ….. the month of January has certainly felt like a long one.  The mixture of extreme excitement and mild fear from a few days ago is still present but I would say confidence is growing now that several days of really hard work seem to be pulling all the strands together. I collected another chunk of new stock from London on Friday and have spent today feverishly taking mannequin shots and loading the stock onto the website. In addition to that, Mondays photos were delivered and provide the perfect images for the homepage and banner shots. Not only was the photo shoot tremendous fun and a wonderful learning experience for me, it now appears there were complete geniuses both behind and in front of the camera that day, as they have captured the essence of the Southern Marine brand with such skill, it makes me realise how absolutely talentless I am with a camera in my hand.
 

So, February 1^st is just about 24 hours away.  It looks like Monday we will open up with a range of approximately 20 T shirt designs, 8 Polo shirts, 6 Sweatshirts, some hoodies, scarves, hats, gilets and jackets. Large amounts of fresh items will arrive within the week, so I expect the website to double in size by next weekend, assuming I can get all the images captured and loaded up. For now, I will add a Coming Soon section, so at least customers can see what garments are in the pipeline, and when to expect them.

Being my first such venture, I am looking to Monday with no honest idea of how much demand there will be. Therefore, one of my largest concerns is stock levels, which I will no doubt have miscalculated in all kinds of ways. If stocks run low, as the garments are produced in London, re-supply is only a matter of a few days. As I find my feet I hope you can bear with me on this topic, and if we do sell out of a particular size in the short term, I will look to inform you immediately, together with an expected delivery date. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that unless entire rugby teams take a fancy to a particular shirt, as XXL’s I hold in the smallest amounts !

Production issues, mostly with embroidery on smaller garments have slowed the delivery of several items to Tuesday/Wednesday of next week. That gives me breathing room to launch a second wave of garments in case the first fall flat on their face. There will also be a larger amount of women’s garments in the second wave as I must confess, my initial approach had been to focus on menswear, as it’s something that by personal experience I know a little more about. However, interest across social media and personal feedback from friends and family quickly convinced me that I should be at a 50/50 split, so very shortly, every garment for men will have a women’s equivalent and visa versa.

I will leave you with a taste of things to come on Monday with a few of today’s shots, taken by myself or by Sandy my lovely wife, in our sunroom where light is at its best in our house. I have also started building the foundations of a Southern Marine Blog on the website. These pre-launch emails will provide the main body of the initial efforts, but I will also try to throw out a few more “off the wall” topics related to Southern Marine as I get the launch behind me and actually start to live something that resembles a normal life again. Blog entries will be accessible through the website and I will mail out links each time I publish one. Every book you read says you HAVE TO HAVE A BLOG, so I felt it best to heed the experts on this one.
Lastly, another reminder, don’t forget to use the code LAUNCH20 in the checkout stage to receive 20% off the cost of all the garments throughout February. I actually need to test that this works ! So after sending this mail, that’s what I am about to do next….. at 1.20am !!!!
 

 Please encourage friends to sign up for this distribution list at https://southern-marine.launchrock.com  and to check the site next week at www.southern-marine.co.uk  I promise not to bore them with anything other than amusing emails.

 
Again, my heartfelt thanks for your support and I SINCERELY hope you like what you find on the website Monday morning.
 
Warmest Regards,

 
Richard Bailey

Southern Marine

 

 http://southern-marine.launchrock.com 
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