Royal Mail Postal Strike

After much wrangling the workers of Royal Mail have decided to strike. As a business it's going to hurt us, there's no doubt about that. We're a mail order business and Royal Mail is our lifeblood.

We do however understand that strikes are a last resort. It seems that the media, the management and the government are against the workers on this one. We are not.

Although the strikes aren't good for us, we understand that they are necessary. They are due to start on the 22nd of October.

This is an edit: just been onto the bbc and I'm shocked at the lack of empathy for Royal Mail workers. Comments like "we never have the same postman anymore", "they closed our local post office" and "they leave the while you were out card when I was in". The decisions behind these changes are not from the workers on the ground, who are striking but the management they are against. The Royal Mail service has been run down over the last decade with an eye on privatisation. That is without a doubt what modernisation means. It will mean a service where Royal Mail is only the "last mile" courier. Anything that makes a profit will be sold off and the public will be saddled with the pensions deficit.

Rollercoaster Year

Well it's nearly a year since phenoptix stopped being a hobby and turned into a full time job.
Lots has changed, including our product range and website. We're about to move offices too, which is long overdue. We're custom building which sounds rather grand.

Where phenoptix starts and Ben ends.

Having been phenoptix, the name of my LED business, on all manner of forums for about 6 years now it feels like my business identity is also my own. phenoptix (always lower case) has a number of online outlets for my opinions but as phenoptix, the legal business entity, grows I (Ben) feel that I should actually use some of these same outlets for my own personal feelings rather than channel them through phenoptix.
Firstly phenoptix doesn't have an opinion on Lily Allen's recent outbursts on filesharing, I on the other hand think that she cunningly advertised in her early days that her work was available on limewire, and nowadays she's against the whole thing along with Darth Mandleson. A bit two faced methinks.
Anyway phenoptix needs to write a blog now.

The Silent Strikes

It seems all of Royal Mail are taking it in turns to have the day off. It's what they call rolling "wildcat" strikes and the effect is crippling the postal service. However it seems they are not getting national coverage.
The net result is that lots of people are not getting their items, and we're getting it in the neck.
Have a look here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1213283/Postal-strike-chaos-Post-Office-managers-forced-sort-mail-pavement.html

Two Websites

We now have two fully functioning websites. The plan was to keep them both running for a month or so as we smooth out the service on the new site. However it will probably take a fair while for www.phenoptix.com to get the google ranking of the old site.

The new website already has more products than the old site, most of which can be found in the prewired LEDs category.

Come along and have a look, let us know what you think!

Website Woes

Our new website is ready to launch on Monday! The only thing is that when we transferred to new servers our providers didn't update the DNS, they just put a redirect on the old server!
Our old server was taken down yesterday, leaving the new one anonymous. The result is that we now have no phenoptix.com emails or website for another 48 hours.
If you're reading this then please be assured, we are still here!

Mid July Blog

Another while between Blogs!

Partially down to impending parenthood meaning that more "spare" time has to be created for all those niggling jobs around the house and garden. The last significant niggling job being 25 meters of 6 foot fence panelling down one side of the garden!
Another "spare" time hog has been jolly old ebay who have insisted on "free" shipping on many listings. To enforce their policy they've cancelled a couple of hundred listings, which all need to be relisted with free (included!) shipping. I've also decided to add a bit more detail to some of them to save time answering the same questions over and over again. So relisting is taking up a fair chunk of time!

Plans for the phenoptix future will involve a new website as we've found our current provider to be pain for integrating credit cards. They also host us on an oversubscribed server in the US, meaning UK customers experience delays in service. We have complained but they deny the problem. Volusion, take note - We are not happy!
Along with the new website we will be relaunching our forums, but with more wholehearted support and a few features to draw people in.
That's just a potted view of where we are I suppose.
Thanks for reading!

First Blog O' The Month

The O' in the title is inspired by facebook adding an English (pirate) language setting to replace the English (UK) or English (US) option.
Blogs haven't been coming thick and fast from me of late as we are nicely busy with orders and too busy with all the other stuff. We've a couple of new projects on the go at the moment and the best of these is a new website we're hoping to launch this month. We'll run it in parallel with the existing site for a while before switching sites and redirecting all the traffic. Hopefully you'll all find it better, we think it'll be an improvement.
Anyway, end of another long day, time for bed.

Another Busy Month

It just goes to show how busy we were in April, it's now well into May and I'm just around to writing about it.
We bought on some new

Long time no blog - New Products on the website!

I feared this would happen from the outset. Packing orders and answering questions have for a while now taken up all available time. It's the weekend, Sunday in fact and I'm blogging after a morning of revamping the website.

This is what I've done of late:We've added a decent range extremely bright 10mm LEDs to the site which you can get to by clicking on the lolly pop looking LED above. We've started with Red, Green, Blue and White and there are also a number of less bright diffuse lens LEDs which I ordered in some years ago to cash in on the LED Throwie thing. I listed about half of the colours then ignored the 10mm LED category, leaving it a very ugly corner of the website.
We've added another 5 product lines, being warm white and orange LEDs in 3 and 5mm and our 5mm RGB LED. They can be found by clicking these little fellas:





There are a few more bits and bobs to come, we have an RGB superflux LED and also a UV superflux which can currently be found on ebay. They have been delayed in making it to phenoptix.com as our pricing scheme for the Superflux category needed a severe update.

New Stuff

Just listed some new items, the much talked about RGB and UV Superflux LEDs

We're Golden

At last we're back up to Gold Powerseller on ebay!
Many thanks for all your support and orders over the last 3 months!!

99.8%

of all our customers are nice, reasonable, sane and reply to emails. 0.2% it would seem are mean, unreasonable, questionable in the sanity department and rarely reply to emails - if ever. 0.2 % Bastards. The rest of you I love.

April Already!

The fourth month of the year is upon us already! It's been rather busy and this blog has been rather neglected. Also there is a small, actually large, amount of stock that is not yet for sale anywhere!!
There's some 1206 SMDs, Superflux LEDs in UV and RGB, tonnes of 10mm LEDs, some Bicolour and Tricolour LEDs in the old style that have been in stock for some years.
Just skimmed some interesting LED stories, that I thought I'd share.

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/led-lights/2009/03/site-update-led-based-performance-art.html

http://science.howstuffworks.com/led-incapacitator.htm

Sorry for the quick, dirty and unedited blog - but sommin is better than nothin.

Mid March Update

Well it's mid March and it has been another truly hectic month so far. Sales have broken the previous month's record already and I'm finding less and less time at the end of every day. Weeks are now 6 days long and the days are coming in between 10 and 16 hours.
It is however fantastic, being busy and seeing so many new customers is a real privilege in these troubled times.
We've added a number of new product lines and are adding more all the time

Good Bye Italy

I've finally cracked! I've had it up to here (I'm holding my hand up above my head!) The Italian Postal Service are Thieves and due to their lack of ability to deliver my packages I have decided to stop sending to Italy.
Apologies to any existing customers, but only 1 in 3 packages gets to it's recipient in Italy. The usual procedure is that I send the items, I get an angry email 2 weeks later, then resend the items and then get a paypal dispute, which of course I lose as it is started as an item not received case. So all in all I lose 2 x the items ordered then the money initially paid.
This post is a rant but I've not posted for a while anyway.

Update: After the red mist cleared I did indeed continue shipping to Italy. Fortunately we have a new agreement with Royal Mail and we should be receiving compensation for every missing parcel.

Aston Martin

I broke a rule today, I usually go by no collections. I work from home and don't want to have people coming and going. At lunch time today I received a call from a very desperate sounding man, needing 90 Red LEDs today as their regular supplier had let them down. So with a man in need, I broke the rule.
He drove a hour to pick the LEDs up and only stopped for a short chat, but in this time he told me where the LEDs would end up, apparently they'd be in Geneva within 48 hours, taking pride of place in the rear lights of the Aston Martin Lagonda at the Geneva Motor show.
I think that's rather cool.

Norway

To everyone in Norway,
Please accept my sincerest apologies. It would seem in my haste to construct an excellent website to service the world's growing need for high quality, low cost LEDs - that resulted in www.phenoptix.co.uk - I forgot to add Norway to my list of countries that I ship to.
Unlike South Park, I do not blame Canada for this oversight, I blame Kenya.
A further apology for unleashing this song on any unsuspecting readers.

This oversight has been rectified. Norway I welcome you to phenoptix.

Regards,

Ben Gray

Snow Problem?

Well you'd think that the UK was up to it's eyeballs in snow. In the East Midlands the reality was a couple of inches of snow, which looked very pretty and wasn't too much trouble to walk or drive in.
Since I work from home a snow day wouldn't really be an option even if there were 6 feet of snow but it would seem, judging by how many customers are still waiting for products sent last week, most of Royal Mail took those days off. A fair few other people took the day off too, 1 in 5 in the UK, 20% of the country's workforce. Amazing.
Hopefully this week everyone will be back to getting their goods next day.
Although all said I like snow, and my puppy, Lilly, likes it too.

Cost Cutting

With my supplier's prices up 25-30% on this summer due to the falling value of the pound I've had to find as many ways to economise as possible to keep prices competitive. I've not yet put up any prices and if the pound starts to recover I shouldn't have to.
One of the first things I've cut down on is packaging. Any customers reading will have noticed the size of packaging has shrunk. I typically send small numbers of SMDs in envelopes now. My rational is that they're packaged in a protective plastic casing anyway and padded between the invoice and envelope. It then means I can send them as a letter rather than a large letter saving 16p which is a massive amount on small value purchases. Otherwise we just use smaller Jiffy bags.
Another thing is we're using less colour in our printing, colour printing just costs too much in these hard times.
Other cost cutting measures are reusing tea bags, bathing less and of course using energy efficient, long lifetime, reasonably priced LEDs from my own stocks on eBay and phenoptix.co.uk

Customer Service

I messed up a few times this week I have to admit, I don't mind compensating, even over compensating when I mess up. I even compensate when the postal service mess up.

5 years on...

So 5 years ago I opened this account for blogging. Seems I didn't get around to it!
Well in the last 5 years a lot has changed, but writing about it all would no doubt take a fair bit of time. So lets concentrate on the now.
The part time pocket money project started at Exeter University is now a full time business. After some neglect our ebay store is back fighting fit and the feedback is clocking up nicely. The website is the next project. Our prices need a little adjustment and we've got loads of new stuff to list.
It's a very exciting time for me, a nervous one too considering the state of the world economy, but I'm expecting big things from phenoptix in 2009.