One of the things I found frustrating was the cost of the type of classic, quality shoes available for boys in the UK, so one of my goals was to try to keep the price as low as possible without sacrificing on the quality.
I did look in to getting a shop in Cheltenham but the rents are very high, one very small retail outlet in a good area for shopping that I felt would suit my potential customers was £18,000.00 a year and I would have had to sign up for a minimum of 5 years so I would have had to increase the price of the shoes quite alot to cover that cost plus I would have to employ people to work in the shop and then there are the rates and insurance etc. So I decided to keep it all on line to keep my costs down.
This meant that my web shop needed to be right!
I was conscious of the image I wanted to put across. I had researched a lot of websites selling shoes and the one thing that really frustrated me was that when I landed on the site it wasn’t clear where to click to see what I wanted, it was also very common to find the websites had so much information on them I would click straight off because they looked messy, too many colours, too many lists etc.
I am the type of shopper that when I walk in to a shop I don’t trail through the rails looking at each individual item I scan the shop visually and if nothing pops out in the colour that I like I walk away! I suppose I am a lazy shopper (unusual for a woman maybe, I don’t like shopping unless I need something and don’t see the point of window shopping??!!) I like to get to what I want quite quickly.
I was quite clear in my mind about the type of boy that would want to wear the shoes that Cool Boys would have and so I wanted to put that across in my logo and my website. I was really lucky to come across a fabulous lady in the USA that was a graphic designer but also an illustrator, she is a mother of boys too and totally understood where I was coming from when I gave her my brief. We never met but had a great understanding and she was just as excited about Cool Boys Shoes as I was!
We finally came up with the logo and I feel it puts across what we are all about.
The boy in the logo is inquisitive about life and loves exploring the world, the ensigns behind him actually spell out C B S. The slightly nautical feel is because we love the sea and sailing and I always feel water is a good energy.
In my opinion a cool boy loves exploring new things, he is fun, enjoys school but loves the holidays too, loves sports, generally behaves well but is also a boy and of course gets up to mischief sometimes!

I had business cards, headed paper and compliment slips printed and I felt really proud to hand my card out.

The feedback was really positive from the start which was good to hear.

A girlfriend that doesn’t have children but is very stylish and whose opinion I respect, saw my business card for the first time and said “it makes me think of the famous five” I was pleased with that response.

In the mean time the website and on line shop was being developed and the designer and I came up with the idea of the picture of the boy looking out to sea being expanded to show what he was exploring down that telescope and this is where the first illustration on the website was born, when Ellen (the designer) sent it I was so excited! She had the idea to add a dog (the boys faithful friend) and I got one of those feelings you get when you just know something is really good, she is such a talented lady and so I commisioned a couple more from her to show Max and Bentley (we decided the characters needed a name at this point) in other fun activities that a cool boy would be get up to, fishing, flying a kite etc. In the future I would like to have a series of books telling all about the adventures Max and Bentley get up to!
The website and shop took much longer than I had anticipated but it was worth the wait, I could have bought an ‘off the shelve’ site and just filled in the gaps but that wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good. It was important to make the sight easy to navigate as well as secure and the developers that created it were fantastic and really good at what they do. Ellen helped me a lot by designing the printable shoe gauge to measure the childrens feet before ordering the shoes and the conversion chart to convert the continental sizes in to UK sizes etc.
I looked in to how to measure feet properly and felt I needed to put this information on the site to help mums feel more confident about ordering shoes on line. Although lots of people order on line now and it is increasing all the time some of the feedback I had from the market research I did was that some mums still feel they ought to go in to a shop to get their childrens feet measured and then buy from that shop. After I explained that by the time they had spent money on petrol and parking, dragged the children here and there, moaning and groaning! It was worth taking the time to measure at home, pay for postage and try at home in a more relaxed situation, even if they have to be exchanged it is still cheaper and easier, they were willing to give it a go.
Another important thing I wanted to do was have pictures of the shoes on a foot. So many websites just show the shoe on its own. I enlisted my son Max to be a model for that so I could do most of the boys shoes but not the baby ones, I intend to get that done at some point too.