Making Miss Milly More Mobile - Access Our Wholesale Jewellery & Scarves From Anywhere

In business, we all know it's important to keep up with technology, but it takes time and money. And, for many of us, we first of all need to understand the how and why to ensure it is right for our companies and their future development. Some technologies can be short-lived or irrelevant to your industry. But if your business is e-commerce based then keeping your website up to date is essential.

Web browsing and shopping today is all about the user experience. With the constant bombardment of emails offering web links to explore and the huge time pressures we face, it is essential that when you do visit a site, it’s a great experience and fulfills your needs.

This week, at UK wholesale jewellery supplier, Miss Milly, we have been updating our website with a new responsive format. This will enable the increasing number of users looking at the site on tablets and smart phones to have a better user experience because the site will automatically reconfigure to fit the device it is being viewed on. We have also redesigned the site for Spring and Summer with a clean, fresh feel and colours to suit the season.

We have seen that currently, 65% of users are visiting our website using a desktop and this is down 12% from the same period last year. 21% of users are on a tablet, which is up 9% from 2013. And 14% of users are surfing on a smart phone, up 3% from the previous year. So there is a definite trend to mobile devices and a need to cater specifically for this.

Our customers are retailers who will increasingly use these mobile communication devices during quiet spells in their store or perhaps if they use public transport to commute. So as well as being able to browse our award-winning wholesale jewellery and wholesale scarves when they want, we need to enable them to make orders at their own convenience. This requires an easy to use website that works on all types of device and in which you have complete confidence for placing orders. 

 The new, responsive Miss Milly website integrated with SagePay is just that. 

Costume Jewellery Wholesale - Top Colours for Spring

Costume Jewellery Wholesale Trends Spring 2014

As we start to see the sun come out and the layers come off, costume jewellery makes a great resurgence. We change our outfits with the change of season and relish the opportunity to wear long-forgotten lightweight clothing that has been bundled away over the winter. And at the same time, we look for new fashion accessories to suit our refreshed wardrobe.

Although black and white jewellery is still a strong trend this season, pastel colours have come back out to play with mint green and coral or salmon tones leading the way.  The ice cream tones of lilac, sky blue and candy pink are also en vogue and a great way to dress up the whites and neutral nudes and taupes.

 Pastel colours sit really well with delicate wholesale jewellery and our new Amora Collection marries the two really well. Pretty matt silver bangles and necklaces are highlighted with pale green, light blue, coral and taupe beads.

And the award-winning Floria Collection offers a hugely popular enamel heart necklace and stud earrings in lilac, blush pink and aqua.

The Floria Collection is also home to the other trend for this season, that of tropical bright wholesale fashion jewellery. As fresh spring moves into warm summer, the colours heat up and become bolder and brighter. Our resin twist jewellery uses lush lime, cobalt blue and raspberry pink combined with shiny silver-coloured metal. But we’ve had such a miserable winter that we can’t wait until summer for the tropical colours and this range has already sold out once with new stock due in during early April. 

At Miss Milly, a leading British wholesale costume jewellery supplier, we love colour! And we look forward to every change of season so that we can bring in new tones and shades, and reintroduce old favourites. But it is a fact that in our modern, information heavy world, most people have learned which colours suit them best (or perhaps just the ones they prefer to wear) and so there is a lot less seasonal change in colours than there used to be 10 years ago.

Purple, green and turquoise are the colours that we have found to be the most loved, and which sell all year round. Browns return in the autumn and orange blazes in every now and then. Pinks come in and out of fashion but watch out for pink this year, it is going to be big news in all its varied shades.

Our tips for a top Spring Fair

We start planning Spring Fair in Feb as the previous one closes and we have to decide what to do about space for the following year. But then we put it to one side.

What we should be doing on the final day is making a list of all the little things that make the subsequent show so much easier:

* how many new bulbs to buy

* top up the stationery box with staples and pens that actually work

* how many display stands are now at the end of their lives and need replacing

* remove any items from the stock samples that have definitely sold out

* jot down any ideas about improving the stand - don't rely on your memory as once order processing starts, these ideas will be filed away in the depths of your brain only to resurface on day one of the next show

Wishing all Spring Fair exhibitors a great show next week!

Brighten up your Winter!

Scorn the winter rain with our beautiful scarves. Here are just a few of our lovely new designs, including butterflies, birds, dragonflies, hearts, lips, anchors and flowers...

Visit our website to see the full range. Available online now!

Starting the year with a bang

Miss Milly Limited, wholesale jewellery and fashion accessories supplier, has won a Scoot Headline Award in the national campaign to find Britain’s most successful companies.

The company competed against more than 400 other nominations in the Awards, and will be presented with its trophy and certificate at a glittering presentation ceremony in Millbank Tower, London on April 28.

Sarah Watmore, managing director of Miss Milly, is delighted with the announcement: “Miss Milly is a relatively new business competing on a national level and servicing customers all around the UK and overseas. I am really excited about this award, which proves that it is possible for anybody to build a successful business if they are dedicated and passionate enough.

“We are incredibly positive about 2014 with the launch of our new brand, Little Miss Milly, offering jewellery and accessories for girls, along with new jewellery collections and brand new packaging. And this award is absolute proof that we are going in the right direction.”

As a result of this Scoot Headline Award success, Miss Milly has been invited to have its winning paper published in The National Business Leaders Yearbook, the leading work of reference on successful business techniques and best practice, so that others can follow its lead and learn from their achievement.

You can see more about the business and its products on the company’s website at www.missmilly.co.uk.

Did you know that in Latin, pearl means unique?

 And it is true that no two pearls are identical, in which I believe lays much of their beauty. At home I have an old 35mm film canister (blast from the past) that contains some gorgeous pearls harvested from the sea by my brother during his time spent at a pearl farm near Broome in Australia. They are all irregular and unpolished and very beautiful.

Pearl jewellery is a hugely popular category for Miss Milly, and with the advent of dying and colour, and the evolution of design, there are many contemporary and unusual styles to be found. Our Rainbow Pearl Necklace is consistently one of our best-sellers, and the cobalt blue Milly Pearl jewellery has been hugely popular this year.

Since ancient times, pearls have symbolised unblemished perfection, and have been the ideal wedding gift to represent purity. In the Hindu religion, the presentation of an undrilled pearl and its piercing has formed part of the marriage ceremony. Today in the UK, pearls are still a very popular choice for bridal jewellery.

Pearls are the oldest known gem and were the most valuable for a long time. The ancient Egyptians were buried with them and in classical Rome only people above a certain rank were allowed to wear pearl jewellery. Now, with the advent of pearl cultivation, they are more affordable and available to the mass market.

The most revered pearls are from the South Sea, off the waters of Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Myanmar, the Philippines and Thailand. Their legacy reaches back to the times of early Aboriginal people who believed the gem had supernatural powers and used them in dream interpretation.

Pearls are graded in terms of lustre, surface, shape, colour and size with the roundest, shiniest, largest and smoothest being the most prized, whilst colour is down to individual preference. For us, and we are obviously biased, we prefer the look and individuality of the baroque freshwater pearls that make up our jewellery as they make the pieces more interesting.

If you're also a fan of pearls and pearl jewellery, a trip to the Victoria & Albert Museum this Winter might be in order to see the Pearls exhibition running daily until 19 January 2014.


Pearl information harvested from:
www.pearloasis.com
www.americanpearl.com
www.vam.ac.uk

Our website - a continual evolution

Having a website is a must for almost every business these days. It works as a virtual showroom, an information portal or, as in our case, it is the fundamental tool for your business.

Rather like a shop window, a website needs constant attention, design and functionality tweeks here and there, new information added or a total revamp. At Miss Milly, we have just relaunched our website with a beautiful new design.

Our aim has always been to create a simple and attractive site with a retail feel. Miss Milly is not just a jewellery wholesaler but a brand with its own identity. And we hope that the lifestyle photography on the home page and the aesthetically pleasing design help communicate this to users.

We have also created a specific trade section with call-outs and links to provide retailers with all the information they need about our terms of business and ordering. There is also an emphasis on buy local to encourage consumers to seek out their nearest Miss Milly stockist. The aim of building the brand is to create demand from consumers, motivating them to ask their favourite independent retailers for Miss Milly costume jewellery and fashion accessories.

We welcome all feedback on the website, so please do get in touch.