After years of using only Royal Mail to send our precious baby gifts, today I was forced to look at alternative couriers. Royal Mail keep losing our baby gifts and when you phone them no ones really cares, no one wants to help. For the amount of money it costs to send our gifts the service is just not up to scratch.

So, they lost another one today. I phoned the local delivery office in Tottenham, London to see if the baby gift basket was there and after a short conversation the very rude member of Royal Mail staff put the phone down on me. Poor customer service again by Royal Mail. Why should we pay them our hard earned money. If they don’t lose your item, they damage it!

A new problem has developed now, no ‘sorry we missed you’ card is left after a delivery is attempted. Or was the delivery attempted in the first place?
I could go on and on, but I don’t want to waste anymore time talking about Royal Mail, they have taken up enough of my time over the years.

After a little research I decided to go with Interlink Express. Their customer service is great and they do care about you and your parcels. They also text and /or email the customer on the morning of delivery notifying them of a one hour delivery window. The customer also receives a message with telling them ‘your parcel will be delivered between 10am  – 11am’. You can also call them to change the time or day.

This one hour delivery window is unique to Interlink Express and was a deciding factor for me. Of course I still need Royal Mail for letters, small packets and deliveries to small British Islands around the United Kingdom.  Interlink Express pricing is £5 for up to 10 Kilo which is great. But northern Scotland and non mainland UK areas get pricey at £16 for 10 Kilo. So some items will have to go with Royal Mail still.

So far so good, all baby gifts have been delivered and we are happy at Abc Baby Gifts again.

I’ve been meaning to do this for ages, but today I finally did it. What? Update some out of date product photos on Abc Baby Gifts.

The twin baby gift basket was showing the wrong first tooth keepsake box.

The new mum basket was not showing the new baby soap.

The Christening gift basket had the wrong photo frame.

All fixed today. I took the photos during the week in our lighting cube using our Cannon SLR and did the editing on Adobe Fireworks as normal.

Following on from the last post, I just wanted to give you a quick update on our progress with the casting kit idea.
Teresa, the lady who was making a sample frame up for us has been in touch, she was very honest in the fact that she would not be able to produce a frame for us at the cost we would like and be able to make any profit herself.

As always, we like to try and support our local businesses first, our stationary and boxes come from Puckles Supplies in Canterbury and our soft toys and teddies are from Keel Toys in Ashford.
So it seems we may have to look further afield for a frame at the right cost as in the current climate customers just don’t want to pay the high prices that local manufacture costs. China may be a possibility.

Casting kits are one of our best selling gifts, they make a great idea for a gift especially when you don’t know the sex of the baby. There are many different types of kits available to buy, ranging in quality and price.

We have stocked Baby Art kits for the last couple of years, but the distribution deal has moved from Gro-Group to Dorel UK and Dorel UK have made it hard to obtain stock of their products (Poor sales team). Great move Dorel buy a company for 4.1 million Euros and then make it hard for retailers to obtain stock.  So, we need to find a replacement…Quickly!

Les has been searching the web for a suitable kit, we want a simple, easy to use kit that is air drying rather than one you need to bake. The price is also important, we need a kit that is good value for money so we can offer them to our customers at a reasonable price.

We found a temporary replacement from Cast In Time, this is a good quality kit and the frame is of a much better quality than Baby Art’s frame. The only problem with this kit is the weight, which is something we have to take into account. A couple of other kits we found were from Sculpey, this is a kit that needs to be baked, Creative Casting and Memory Hands also offer great casting kits.

It seems that most of the companies offering kits here in the UK are putting them together themselves, sourcing the frames, clay and boxes seperatley to create their own kit. So this got us thinking, why don’t we put together a casting kit of our own! It would solve the problem of running out or problems with quality.

So, we have approached a local framer and given her an idea of what we need, she is going to put together a frame for us to have a look at. We have ordered various different types of clay from Craft Mill and will test them out on the children to see which gives the best results and Les is looking into having the correct size boxes made up.

Watch this space, it shouldnt be too long before we have the finished product online, produced by Abc Baby Gifts.

 This is the new ‘Home Baby Imprint Kit’ from Cast In Time.

  And above is the old classic Baby Art kit, we’ve sold 1000′s of these over the years.