Wellies.co.nz

I just had an email from a customer about the side buckle on Barbour wellies. It's funny because it is such an important part of the design of the gumboots and yet when I think back, I can not recall ever discussing it with any of our customers. Anyway what the lovely customer wanted to know, before she bought wellies to run up and down the side of a football pitch supporting her husband, was is the side buckle functional or purely decorative? Good question. So I thought I better publish an answer. The side buckle on Barbour wellies (and Hunter wellies) has always been there and it has always been purely decorative. A bit like a bow on a pair of shoes or maybe epaulettes on a shirt. I suppose it is a design link back to a pre rubber boot maybe a leather boot that had a buckle at the side. But Barbour wellies and Hunter wellies have been made for years with it with no real function at all except to make the wellies look stylish. If you look at photo's of the queen out in winter going right back to when she was a girl, you will see the side buckle on her lovely green wellies. and If you look at Kate Moss in her lovely blue wellies at Glastonbury festival you will see her in blue wellies  or pink wellies with the side buckle doing nothing but making her wellies look a bit more stylish while she dances around in the mud. 

Anyway, it's really lovely to think of our customers looking stylish like Kate Moss as they watch football here in New Zealand.

Suzy@wellies

 Wow what a busy time it’s been for us at Wellies. We have been very hectic since our short summer break with lots of orders coming in for late Christmas present gummies.

January has been a lot more busy than we would normally expect. Lots of ladies wanting to try out our new colours as shown in the magazine ads we have placed over Christmas. We don’t normally see many gummies going away in the post until February. I think we are suffering from the success of our decision to advertise over the summer months in the magazines that everyone takes to the beach and reads from cover to cover.

Anyway it is very exciting to see such a healthy volume of gumboot orders coming in from customers and retailers across Australia and NZ. 2012 is definitely going to be the year of Barbour wellies in both countries. We have a growing list of very happy customers and retailers, and a lot of promotions planned.

Thankfully the hot weather has finally arrived here. It’s not wellies weather!! which it was for the first few months of summer. As a Christmas present to myself I have a new pair of Olive Barbour wellies which are the very traditional English green gumboot as worn by the Queen and Kate Moss (among others). I love them, but I am quite happy to wait a few more months before wearing them. Let’s hope this lovely summer weather holds.

Other things coming up this year… We had so many people placing orders for gifts to other people in December, that we are in the process of launching a wellies gift voucher. That’s going to make things really easy at Christmas and birthdays. So watch this space. Lovely European made gumboots make the perfect gift for the lady who has everything. We will also be placing Barbour wellies into some very exciting fashion shoots in 2012. So keep an eye out for us in the fashion pages.

It’s all go at wellies!

I hope you are really enjoying the summer and not, for a change, getting gumboot weather where you are!

 

Suzy@wellies
       
        

Hi everyone who has placed an order for our lovely ladies wellie boots as Christmas presents in the last  24 hours. These have all been posted as quickly as humanly possible. A load went out in the post to Australia and NZ this morning. 

We are very happy to process orders for gumboots between now and Christmas but please be aware that we are past the point of being confident of delivery for Christmas morning. Still its very nice to get a wonderful pair of European made gummies for Xmas even if they arrive a few days late!

Have a welly good Christmas

Suzy@wellies

 Its so fun seeing lots of lovely pairs of wellies being posted off as Christmas presents to people across Australia and New Zealand. So nice to think of those lovely pink, red, green and blue gumboots being unwrapped on Christmas morning by happy ladies. They really are the perfect gift for the lady who has everything. Particularly if she has a garden! I can’t wait until we start receiving the nice emails from people who got their wellies just in time to put them under the tree.
Still very wet here. Who would think it would be wellies weather in December!! Still it is making this a very low stress season for us in the garden. We have hardly used the sprinklers at all and the plants look wonderful.
By the way, we still get a few customers coming through who are interested in our range of Hunter gumboots. We only have a very limited number of Hunter wellies left now. They are in the larger sizes and not in many of the popular colours. We will try to help you if we can but there are a number of English gumboot retailers who will ship Hunters to home shoppers in Australia and New Zealand. Personally I would like to encourage you all to stick with Barbour. They are made in Europe, not China and all of our customers have had a great performance from them. Sadly that was not the case with the new Chinese made Hunters which tended to lose their colour very quickly in warm weather.
I can recommend Barbour wellies highly enough. And the new colours look great. I hope you are enjoying the lovely photos of them on our website.
Merry Christmas xx
Suzy@wellies

 Funny how lots of good things happen at once! Here is a round-up of the last few days at wellies. First up, as usual, lots of people are giving our great designer gumboots to their loved ones for Christmas. So it’s a very busy time of year sending gumboots by post to customers all over New Zealand and Australia.
On top of that Christmas gumboot season, we have had a very big shipment arrive in from Europe. It’s so exciting when the big trucks pull up to the warehouse. We used to really have our hearts in our mouths with the Hunter gumboots arrived from China because of the quality issues, but European made Barbour gumboots are excellent quality and it really is a pleasure to open the boxes and see each gleaming new pair. Every pair gets inspected on arrival and I can happily report that the build quality and the colours are perfect.
It is always a couple of hectic days getting all the gumboots sorted and safely placed into the warehouse. Then we have to start fulfilling retailer orders for the new stock – so that takes a few days.
So as if that wasn’t enough for us. In this latest shipment there were lots of new gumboot colours. Pink, Rustic, Olive. All of them look amazing. So we have had to quickly get those new colours up onto the wellies website for Christmas shopping (people are already snapping up the new range of gumboot colours online).
You would think we would stop at all that for a week’s work. But no, a friend of wellies who is an international model could only make last weekend for a photo-shoot with the new boots. So we were sorting out the wonderful photographer and all the locations – and then running the shoot while all of these other things were going on. It has been pretty busy!!
The really good news is the photo’s look totally superb. They really celebrate the different colours with wonderful settings and props. The beautiful model Sarah and the photographer Lucy did an incredibly professional job. The photos, which will be on our site soon, really bring to life the wonderful range of fashion colours that the Barbour gumboots come in, and they show some of the diverse places that our users get the most out of the fashion gummies. Thank you ladies for doing such a wonderful job. I can’t wait until the pictures are up on the website.
Finally I suppose we have the weather to thank for making things even busier. Whenever it rains people suddenly think about buying gumboots, and in case you haven’t noticed it has been raining in NZ and Australia this week, a lot. So lots of ladies from across NZ and Aus have been getting onto their wet weather boot requirements.
So a very, very busy, and fun time at wellies.
I hope everyone is getting their Christmas shopping done and planning a nice holiday.

Suzy@wellies

 So the Christchurch show was a big success. The Barbour gumboots looked stunning with all the colours on show in our tent. A real eye catcher. Thank you to everybody who stopped by and had a look at the wellies and thank you to everyone who bought a pair. We are still giving NZ$10 from every sale to Ronald McDonald house until Christmas and we raised several hundred dollars for that wonderful charity during show week. It's actually quite busy for this time of year in the welly business, thanks to all this rain we have been getting. I suppose, like me, all of our customers are getting out in their wellies to catch up with the weeding. I spent 3 hours today on hands and knees in my lovely red Barbour gumboots weeding around our new rhodos. It's incredible how much the rhodos have grown this spring but so have the weeds! 

I hope everyone is having as glorious season as we are having so far. 

Oh and make sure you place your orders early if you plan to give Barbour gumboots this Christmas. We will be very busy because we have been advertising quite a lot in New Zealand and Australia. 

Happy gardening, 

Suzy@wellies

A really big week for Wellies this one. We are at the Canterbury A&P Show. Such an important show this one for Christchurch. Getting everyone back on their feet again with a big party at the show and the races. Hopefully lots of those feet will be in stylish Barbour wellies. We are in a lovely tent with a great big range of beautiful colourful gumboots. So please come and visit us if you are at the show. Lets hope for great weather.

Suzy@wellies

If you have visited our home page in the last few days you will see our great new Wellies sponsorship of Ronald McDonald House. Until Christmas, whether you are buying Barbour gumboots online from us in Australia or New Zealand, we will donate NZ$10 to Ronald McDonald House. This wonderful organisation supports the families of ill children during the very difficult times that they face. Wellies are very, very proud to be supporting RMH and supporting the families of ill children this Christmas. 

Barbour gumboots are a great gift to give to your family and friends. I think it’s also very nice for you our customers to know that a little bit of that gift is going to help some seriously ill children and their families. 

We are looking forward to writing that cheque for RMH in January 

Suzy@wellies

Back now in NZ for nearly a week. We had a wonderful time in the UK. A wedding in the country and lots of fun in London. They are having a very hot Indian summer this year so not seeing a lot of wellies out and about yet. I did enjoy catching up on the latest fashions. Some very very short shorts and lots of Mustard yellow. I think the European economic problems are making the girls show lots of leg this year, apparently that always happens in a recession.  

Really enjoying being home. Enzo missed us, he has done quite a lot of damage to our furniture since we got back, so that's his way of telling us we shouldn't have gone away, I caught him yesterday on the lawn with my beautiful red wellies. He didn't chew them. I think he knew he would be in trouble as he knows I love them. He just wanted attention. We have decided to get him a friend! watch this space. 

Lots of excitement in the online gumboot selling business. We received some wonderful editorial coverage in last weekends Auckland Herald. Thank you to everybody who contacted us about seeing the wellies in that fashion shoot. We have also got a big wellies advertising campaign breaking. Well big for us! To raise awareness of Barbour gumboots in the lead up to Christmas.  Barbour wellies make brilliant Christmas presents. So it's been very busy on the sales front for the last few days as people see the ads, it's taken quite a lot of catching up particularly with jet lag. 

Our next big shipment of gumboots is on the water now from Europe. It contains some exciting new gumboot colours. So watch out for some additions to our range on the website soon. 

Suzy@wellies

Never very much fun packing for a big trip. Still it is going to be great to get to London and see the latest fashions. It will be the first time I haven't had my wellies on for months! It's been so wet. It will be nice to catch the end of the European summer and come back to the Australasian spring. Always really inspiring to see what the girls in London are wearing and we will get to see the very latest range of Barbour clothing in stores. I will update the blog with anything really interesting that I see. For those of you after a pair of gumboots for the last few weeks of the ski season, don't worry Janey is still busily processing sales and sending gumboots out to people all over NZ and Australia. Lots of people taking advantage of our spring sale which is great and we have invested in a few new bits of technology to help us serve you guys faster and better. Barbours are proving so popular we are really looking forward to next year when hopefully you will see us in a lot of magazines in the lead up to Autumn 2012. Oh and I must not forget to mention the rugby world cup. All you ladies who want to look great at the games make sure you get your orders in soon for a pair of Barbour wellies. I think you will find it a bit more difficult to get hold of us once the games start. Very exciting and just what we need after a long winter. See you all in September. 

Suzy@wellies