We're Live...For Real!

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last 18 months it’s that the minute you think you have it all figured it out, it’s time to change, catch up and adapt.  It’s an understatement to say this keeps us on our toes…but we thrive on this sort of stuff, so it’s fun.

Such is the story of our little website. If you’ve been following us since we were just a fine art gallery, you might remember the first rendition of our website. Ann, who is very tech-y and has a great sense of media design, literally generated the first go-around of our site all by herself.  It was wonderful.  If you were viewing art, it was easy to see images and get information. Behind the curtain, it was a breeze for us to update and manage.  All we had to do was some clicking on the keyboard and images miraculously appeared clearly on the screen.  There was plenty of room to add our little messages and gallery news and we had great fun with that. So we all happily cruised along for a good many years with Huff Harrington Part One.

Remember this?

 Fast forward five years later to the opening of Huff Harrington Home…and our frantic realization that we really needed a multi-faceted website to handle all the product we were offering at the store. We had fine art from the gallery side and then a myriad of product from the Home side.  What do to? We put our heads and hearts into it and hired a talented outside team to help us design Huff Harrington Part Deux. (We had gotten a glowing recommendation on Mara and Kristi of Works-Progress from one of our favorite authors, New York Times best-seller, Emily Giffin.)

We had a blast coming up with the creative part and spent hours and hours agonizing over cute icons and logos that perfectly summed up who and what we are.  We didn’t want to be too serious, but we didn’t want to be too frivolous, either.

 Our designers came up with these adorable icons that we fell in love with.  Meg’s on the left and Ann’s on the right.

 

This little chair is perfect as the icon for the store.

 

A cute frame pops up for the gallery.

 And just like any other proud parents, we have now thankfully forgotten the painful first round of photography that didn’t quite mesh with what we envisioned in our heads.  We’ve also glossed over the endless cropping and re-sizing of images that seemed to go on for days on end.  We finally started to get the hang of it and the result was beautiful, really capturing our personality and our vision for the branding of Huff Harrington.

 

 Our site’s home page. We’ve always loved the elegant imagery and clean white space.

It worked well for a while but then we started noticing little glitches that we didn’t just love.  The art had become a hyper-sensitive sliding screen show and I, for one, could never manage to get my mouse exactly where I needed it to be to view a painting.  We had too many messages bombarding our viewers.  And, although it was absolutely gorgeous, we felt it was a little clunky and hard to move around.  In the back of our minds, we were both thinking “uh-oh….”

And now a little backtrack:  in December, right after the blur of the holiday shopping season had passed and we actually had a couple days to recover, we assigned each other a homework project:  pour yourself a big glass of wine and write down our goals and objectives for 2013.  Since we’re basically always on the same page, it wasn’t a surprise that we both listed “E-Commerce!” as something we wanted to get up and running this year.

 

Our very important annual board meeting.

Guess what that meant? A whole new website designed specifically for e-commerce and the easy-peasy click of a button to purchase whatever it is that captures your fancy.  Sounds like a breeze, right?

 

It was high time to get into e-commerce even if we did go kicking and screaming…

So, it was back to the drawing board….and the stark realization that we had to upload literally every single item we were planning  on selling.  Oh, and re-photograph it, too and make sure item numbers, prices and quantities were correct. And then because we like to give as much information and character as we can to anything we do, we had to go through every item and write a fun description.

 

 One of the never-ending descriptions we wrote over the course of a month or two.

 It doesn't sound like much but we knew we were in for the long haul when we hit 2,000 skus on our inventory.  And don’t get us wrong. We both love to write but after a few weeks of mind-numbing descriptions, we started mumbling “we simply couldn’t resist this 19th century something-something-something” or “add a little ooh-la-la with this one of a kind…” in our sleep.  You get the picture.

 

 Luckily, we had our secret weapon lurking in the back office with us: smart, efficient and adorable Emily who’s been with us since before we opened our doors to HHH.  She’s an excellent and clever writer, knows all there is to know about managing social media and such and it was no surprise to anyone that we happily promoted her to help us with marketing the gallery and the store.  But it didn’t take her long to start mumbling in her sleep either and we all started talking just like our descriptions on the website.

 Emily has been spending the last few months measuring, measuring and measuring.

In the meantime, we were fretting about the idea of giving our e-commerce website a little personality.  After all, we like having fun and think that’s an important part of who we are. Struggle as we did, we just couldn’t come up with the right personality for our e-commerce.  Was it a little character called “Shoppy”? Was our cute little bag icon cute and easy to understand? In the end, we decided on our adorable shopping bag icon as the clickable front door to our site.  But there were plenty of sleepness nights.

 Click here and Shop will get you straight to Huff Harrington!

While all that was going on, we had lots of boring financial stuff to figure out (including a couple 4 a.m. wake-ups thinking “Oh no! Did I give them the right account number for the websales??!!”  Of course we did, but you know how it is at 4 a.m.

 For a while there our days were starting at 4 a.m. with racing minds and panic attacks about all the little things we were afraid we forgot. Luckily there weren’t many.

The whole time, our quiet and supremely efficient and capable web-designers, Mara and Kristi were calmly holding our hands.  We kept begging for one more day to fix an image, or another couple hours to repair some copy on a description.  Finally, they had enough of our whining.  ”You’re never really ready. It’s like having kids,” they told us.  ”Just hit the GO button and be done with it!”  So we took a huge, deep breath and said “GO!”

Before we announced it to the world, we decided to very, very quietly go live and figured we had some time to check and double-check that everything was working the way it should.  We ran some test sales.  And then, when we were least expecting it, we got our very first web sale and we were ecstatic.  We actually had the product in stock and…that’s when we came to a rumbling stop.  Aggghhh!  The control key we needed to use on our point-of-sale system had mysteriously disappeared so we couldn’t clear the sale through inventory.  We hadn’t gotten the correct link from UPS to begin our service with them.  But it was great because we were able to work a couple kinks out.  Two steps forward…

 

 Our very first web order is for one of our favorite products: the Laduree bath line. We’re one of a handful of retailers in the U.S. Ohh la la!  Our lovely customer is as crazy about them as we are.

And then today: in the very hours before we announce our cute new site, we beg our accommodating designers for one more thing: a little banner proclaiming we’re live.  They, of course, oblige…and the banner is there in top left corner wherever you are on the website. How smart is that?!  This is a screen shot, but please, please check out the real thing!

 

 At the last minute before announcing our new site, we begged for a little banner that would announce our e-commerce arrival.

So you get the idea.  Unlike your kids, whom you basically love all the time, we tend to love the website one minute and hate it the next.  But we figure we’re stuck with each other for the foreseeable future so we better learn to get along.

So, please…click here to arrive at our new shopping site.  Have a browse and let us know what you think. We hope you have positive and happy comments but we’ll take the criticisms very maturely and hopefully learn from them.  In the meantime, huffharrington.com is still our little baby and we love it to death. And we hope you do, too!

Ta ta.