Dressing up for Children in Need!

Dressed up for Childen in Need!

Well, if you were to check out the webcams today, you might just be in for a surprise.  Maria and Caren are currently dressed as Nuns, I am a fairy (with fairy wings, a tu-tu and a tiara!) and Paul is an evil doctor!!! Mwah ha ha ha…

It’s all in aid of Children in Need 2008.  We’re trying to raise as much as possible by pestering each other (and the boss!).  On top of this, I will be personally donating an extra pound for every Wormery sold today!

Oh my… I need to work on that beer belly!!!

Why not have a look and see if you can spot us?

Cheers,
Liam

Remembrance Day

Just a quick note to say that all of the staff here will be given the opprtunity to observe the 2 minute silence at 11:00 tomorrow, 11th November.

During the silence we won’t be answering calls so you may have a slightly longer wait than usual if you do call us at this time (or slightly after).

You may have noticed the poppy currently on our website.  We’re all wearing our Poppy’s with pride and respect!

Cheers,

Liam

Halloween Happenings at Original Organics

Well if you call Original Organics today you might be in for a spook!

Maria and Caren

Maria and Caren have come in to work today sporting their Halloween Atire.  Are you scared?

I shant make any comments about them being witches   Promise.

Oh – and I’ve just made the website a bit more like Halloween… check out Tommy Tiger Worm’s new witch hat!

Back from Ecommerce Expo

Yesterday Paul and I visitied the Ecommerce Expo in London.

Ecommerce Expo

After an early morning leaving Devon and after driving through the snow on the M25 and battling our way through the early morning rush hour on the tube we sure were happy to reach the Olympia Hall in London.

Our dampened spirits were quickly uplifted, though, as we walked through the doors and were greeted with loads of free goodies and promotional merchandise – oh and the hot cup of coffee was lovely too!  (I don’t just go to these things for the freebies – promise!)

Doing a sizeble chunk of business online, it was interesting to visit a show geared up and focussed towards ecommerce and the range of exhibitors was fairly impressive.  Anything from web design firms who can get you online to web hosting firms to make sure your website is always available.  And then from sales and marketing companies through to fulfilment and delivery companies – with everything in between.

Big Ben

Of course the big boys like Google, Paypal etc.. etc.. were all there promoting their own products and services and running masterclass sessions.  We attended the Google University Advanced Masterclass in the afternoon and learnt a thing or two – but of course we do think we are experts already!  We do a lot of online advertising using Google AdWords – so it was good to be able to speak to people from Google.

The most interesting part though, was the look on faces when I said our customers buy wormeries and worms from us online!

Liam Martin

And the leaves that are green… turn to brown

(with apologies to Paul and Art)

Autumn Leaves

Well as the rather disappointing wet and wintery Summer edges into Autumn, the season may just be catching up with the weather!

Here in rural Devon the harvest is almost in and the maize is as high (as it is allegedly in Oklahoma) as an Elephants eye.  But the harvest I am looking forward to is plentiful organic, soil enriching and although not edible it is free.

In fact as is sadly often the case with what is plentiful and free it is so often ignored, neglected, wasted and unwanted by so many.  My free harvest that is simply leaves, leaves from the millions of deciduous trees which enhance our lovely island.  For with but a modican of knowledge, minimum effort and some patience nature will turn your lawn rakings, boarder clean up and path sweepings into a rather magical and special compost known as leafmould.

Turning one mans problematic waste into a truly excellent natural and organic soil enricher and conditioner arguably better, and certainly more environmentally friendly, than peat is but a small chore  and if like me you love getting down to earth in the garden then it is rather fun!

Turning your pile of leaves into leafmould is simple.  Firstly decide upon your container.  This will depend upon the quantity you have at your disposal.  A couple of large black dustbin bags with a few holes punched in them will suffice for the odd wheelbarrow load.  For larger quantities a few wooden sticks with chicken wire attached can cope with just about all you’ve got.  Proprietary leafmould makers are, of course, available on line from quality websites……..OK enough said.

I’ve written a guide to getting the best leafmould possible and was going to post it here – but Liam thought it was good enough to go on the main website so I’ll post a link to it instead :-

How to make great leafmould at home

Enjoy!

Clive Roberts

An Original Organics Online Evolution

For those that don’t know (and that, i accept, is most people – i know i am a geek!) this year marks web search giant Google’s 10th Birthday.  As part of their celebrations they’ve rolled back the clock to 2001 and allowed people to search the web using their oldest index.

It got me thinking about the evolution of our own website.  If you search for ‘wormery’ using Google 2001, it didn’t know about the Original Organics website back then (though the first result was one of our customers).  Believe it or not, though, we did have a few cobbled together pages with a little info about us back then.

Our first website! See those tiny pics of our Wormeries?

Most of our business at that time was mail order (via catalogues); through local authority ’schemes’; and dealing with a number of very loyal trade customers.  It’s amazing just how much things have changed in just 7 years.  Now, a growing number of people contact us by email rather than the telephone – and our website is by far the biggest contributor to the direct sales side of our business.  We also have a much larger base of trade customers from small eBay businesses to large mail order organisations and from small, independent, garden centres to retail giants.  But even the trade customers usually find out about us and approach us via our website.

The first Original Organics Online Shop!

We launched our first online shop in 2005, just 3 years ago and after about a year or so of ‘in house’ (i.e. Me!) development and a very steep learning curve!  It was a bit ‘rough around the edges’ but it worked (and it was secure!) and as a result we brought our expertise on worms and composting to a much wider audience.  After all – we did invent the Wormery - and if people look online they should find us!

We were ‘late’ to the enter the online market if you ask me.  I think it was partly because being so rural (less than 1,000 lines on our exchange at the time) we still didn’t have access to broadband.  But also because we were so busy elsewhere – most notably with our local authority composting schemes.

Our website today!

Over the last couple of years, however, we’ve put a lot more effort into the online side of our operation launching a new design in 2007 which has seen us through the last 18 months… and we have a lot more planned for 2009.  As discussed in a recent Blog post, we have expanded our “Web Team” (that’s me and Paul!).

A sneak preview!

So now, if you search the internet for “Wormeries” – you should find us fairly near the top!

Reporting live from RWM 2008

Wormeries and Composters at RWM

We’re exhibiting at the Recycling & Waste Management show this year for the first time.  It’s the first year that we’ve exclusively had the worm works as part of our range so we thought we would bring it down along with our Classic Wormeries and a brand new product too which we’re launching officially next week (more on that soon – watch this blog!).

It’s a rubbish show – no really!!  But it’s the biggest and best rubbish show you may wish to visit if you’re a Local Authority, a big business / corporation, in the recycling industry or if you’re just interested in the latest and greatest in the world of waste management and recycling.

RWM Exhibition

It’s great the focus that people are putting on recycling and some of the tools here that enable recycling of almost anything and everything are very impressive.  It’s truly wonderful to see so much effort being put into recycling and initiatives that encourage and enable recycling.  However, there is just one thing that concerns me slightly and that is the realisation that a lot of the machinery and plant tools themselves to process recycling on a large scale actually use a massive amount of fuel and resources to run.

I’ve seen some impressive machinery so far.  Including shredders that can accept whole rubber tyres and turn them into rubber chips, even seperating the steel you find in many tyres.  Watching the video demonstrations of huge tyres literally being thrown into a giant shredder was really quite impressive – but the fuel that they use to get the power required to carry out it’s laborious job must be immense.

Now, I know that the majority of it is necessary – and the fuel required and carbon emissions spent to recycle outweigh the cost of excess landfill and manufacturing with virgin materials – but it’s still food for thought.

It does, however, demonstrate how even more important it is that we think more about the waste we create at home and what we can do more locally to avoid further processing where possible.  One example of this is the re-using of plastic carrier bags, or opting for the natural jute alternatives instead.  Another is actually minimising on the use of packaging in the first place – where possible.  Another is much closer to home (for me anyway!) and that is composting at home.

Many councils provide ‘brown bins’ and take some or all food / garden waste away – but by processing it in the home in a Wormery / Compost Bin you’re removing the work the council have to do to process it – effectively helping to reduce their fuel consumption at the same time.  Not only that – but you get something back too… the compost and liquid feed to use in the garden.

Rubbish – it’s big business!

Liam Martin
Director

BBC Countryfile Recommend the Classic Rotol

This one almost passed me by!  Whilst standing around in a newsagents’ waiting for my fiancée to decide what to buy, I took a browse through this months edition of the BBC Countryfile magazine.

I was delighted to see that the Classic Rotol Compost Convertor was listed as one of the “Top 10 Eco-Buys”!  I must admit to being a little surprised that no Wormeries were mentioned, but we can’t have everything can we?

Of course, I did purchase this magazine… the remains of which, by the way, will soon be in my Classic Rotol

Website Technical Issues

Hi all,

We’re currently experiencing a hardware failure with our primary website server (this is the computer that hosts our website so it is visible on the internet). Because of this, our websites are not currently available.

This also means that our staff are unable to view orders placed by customers online. Telephone orders are unaffected.

We’re working as hard as we can to bring them back online, but it may be some time as it is likely to requre a trip to London (where the server is) to replace the faulty hardware.

If you would like to be informed when the website is back online – please subscribe to this Blog or keep checking for updates!

In the meantime, don’t forget you can find out all about our products and buy by phone by calling our friendly customer service team on :-

Freephone 0808 120 9676

Many Thanks,

Liam Martin

UPDATE 10:30 AM :- Engineers are currently replacing the faulty hardware and reconfiguring and installing the server software on our primary website server. @originalorganics.co.uk email is currently functioning as we have failed over to a secondady email server, however, general customer mail is not yet accessible by our customer service team.

UPDATE 11:45 AM :- The affected hardware (primary hard disk) has been replaced and the server is now being configured. It is likely to take a little while for the configuration to take place (customer and website data is intact) but we hope to be back online by the end of play today.

UPDATE 16:15 PM :- We are continuing to work hard on re-enabling our websites and email. The server is now installad and we are in the process of restoring backups and finishing off the configuration. We will then need to perform some performance, error and security tests to ensure the server is ready to go live. We are aiming to restore access within the next few hours.

UPDATE 22:30 PM :- We are pleased to report that we are 85% back online and have been for a good few hours.  Depending on your internet provider it may take a few more hours before the website is shown for you again.  Staff Members can now access orders placed online.  We apologise for the inconvenience this outage may have caused you.

Looking to work with worms?

Do you love worms? Is your Wormery your pride and joy? Do you have a passion for great customer service?

If so, this position might be right up your street!

We’re busier than ever right now, which, whilst great for business, unfortunately means that we’re currently not answering calls as quickly as we’d like (no wait whatsoever) during the most busy periods of the day and emails may take a little longer than the usual 20 minutes we aim for for a reply!

Although our super-fancy, high-tech, new telephone system does allow you to listen to some relaxing classical music whilst you wait a moment to speak to us, we know how annoying it can be having to hold on – even if it is for just a couple of minutes. So, as only the best customer service will do for our customers (how cheesy is that?) we’re recruiting for our friendly office team!

The ad does say “Sense of humour essential to personal sanity” and its not wrong. We are all a bit crazy here!

Any interested applicants follow the instructions on the ad

The danger of working next door to a chocolate factory!

I wonder if any of you caught “Willie’s Wonky Chocolate Factory” on Channel 4 recently.  One day, a few months ago, I popped up to the food trailer on our quiet little Business Park only to find a fully blown film crew marvelling over Mags (that’s the lady that runs the trailer) grating a block of 100% Cacao chocolate over her Chili-Con-Carne.  All I wanted was a Tuna & Sweetcorn baguette!

What later followed was a 4-part television documentary series on a guy called Willie and his quest to make the first 100% Cacao chocolate block.  How amazing (or perhaps dangerous?!?) that his chocolate factory is just over the road from Original Organics!

I don’t profess to be the best cook (far from it!), but I wanted to try this stuff out for myself.  His product is now sold in Selfridges and Waitrose to name a couple of stores, but being from a small Devon village neither of those establishments are close by.

So, the other day I excitedly popped over to Willie’s Chocolate Factory to purchase myself some of his finest Venezuelan Black.  Strangely, though I don’t know Willie at all, I feel ‘proud‘ of his acheivement and I really enjoy supporting another local business – so away I came with a full case.

Inside, a gorgeous recipe for some truly scrumptious truffles and a recipe for a tasty Chocolate Cake.  Though I’m sure my worms would love both of those items, neither will manage to get anywhere near as far as going into my Wormery!

If you too were excited about the programme and want to find out more – his website is at www.venezuelanblack.com where, I am told, you will soon be able to order online!

Welcome…

… to the all new Original Organics Blog.

We’ve moved the Blog to a new location using wordpress.com.  Fortunately, it was easy for us to import all the old Blog posts into this new Blog – so the history is all still available.  We’ve neglected the Blog recently as it has been really busy at Original Organics Towers.  I am hoping I will get some spare time more regularly to allow me to keep this Blog relatively updated.  A challenge for a busy person like me!

Let’s see how it goes!

Festive Opening Times

Because we’re friendly folks here at Original Organics, all our staff will be taking an extended (and very well deserved!) break between Christmas and New Year. That means that our offices and telephone lines are shut down from Christmas Eve right through to the 2nd January, 2008.

All orders placed between now and the 2nd January will be despatched as soon as we’re back. If you would like to leave us a message or send us an email, please bear with us and we will get back to you. The first week back is very hectic, so your patience would very much be appreciated whilst we get back into the swing of things after the Christmas break!

We would like to sincerely thank all our customers for their business in 2007 and wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous 2008!

Updated : There is still time to order for Christmas!

NB. CHRISTMAS DELIVERIES NO LONGER AVAILABLE

Wormeries make a fascinating, exciting (and not to mention different) present for Christmas and they appear to be a very popular choice for 2007! Don’t despair if you’ve not yet ordered – if you’re on the UK Mainland and not in the Scottish Highlands or Grampians, our last order date for Christmas Despatch is :-

Friday 21st December at 11:30 AM (Delivery Christmas Eve)

For customers in the Scottish Highlands, or Grampians, on an offshore Island or in Northern Ireland, our last order date for Christmas Despatch is :-

Thursday 20th December at 09:00 AM (Delivery Christmas Eve)

Unfortunately, in order to guarantee despatch for Christmas delivery to non-UK Mainland locations and the Scottish Highlands and Grampians, there is an increased delivery charge of £12.95. This is because we will be despatching by BusinessPost instead of Royal Mail. If you are happy to wait, or if you are not ordering for Christmas, you can select our usual despatch method at the usual price.

From this week, we will be despatching all orders to the UK Mainland (excluding Highlands / Grampians) by courier to avoid potential postal delay. If you wish to avail of Courier Delivery outside the Mainland you can select the Xmas Delivery option when you checkout.

Please note that whilst we will do all we can to get your order to you by Christmas, we do rely on our couriers. Wormeries delivered for Christmas will be sent by BusinessPost on an express overnight service. Larger items are despatched by NightFreight. Whilst we can guarantee despatch in time for Christmas, we have no control over any potential delays once the item is within the network of our couriers. Our couriers are usually very reliable (over 99% overnight success rate on our goods) however, to avoid disappointment – order as early as possible! Please also remember to let us have a contact telephone number so the driver can contact you if he/she cannot locate you!

Wormery Photo Competition Winners

Coming Soon!

We’re really sorry that we’ve not been able to announce the winners of the Wormery Photo Competition just yet. The response was unprecedented and we’ve had over 300 entries – some of which will make it onto the website but just 1 that will be crowned king!

We’ll be arranging the judging this afternoon and announcing the winners early next week – right here!

Regards,

Liam Martin
Director