Let the SALE begin!

TODAY LaDiff kicked off our
15th annual 4th of July Sale
(15 years ... yowza!).

We LOVE this sale.

We learned a long time ago... hmmm, 15 years to be exact, that you either have a super fun, exciting, energetic sale event over the 4th of July ... or you close for the day (or longer!).

We chose the former! and - boy - do we have fun with this sale.

We've made customers sing patriotic songs for their discount.
We've had them wear red, white, or blue to get the sale prices.
One year we even made them play a kazoo! (American-made, naturally)
When we moved into our CURRENT spot across from the Canal Walk, complete with our indoor parking garage, we decided to have even MORE fun and have a customer cookout ON the 4th every year.

To see some of the cool stuff that's on sale BEFORE you visit, go to ladiff.com To get details on the sale itself and how the amazing 3-tiered discount structure (10% - 15% - 20%) works, please come visit in person!

In the meantime, watch your mailbox for the postcard, watch your TV for the uber-amazing ad produced by Elevation Advertising, and watch the papers for our print ads. ... here's a sampling of what you'll find:

So, even though your red-white-and-blue ensemble is NOT required dress for THIS year's sale pricing, we hope you'll get all patriotic anyway and come on down to LaDiff for our favorite sale of the year... because when it's over, it's over for a whole year!

What a contest!

Holy moly!

Boy, were we surprised, and overwhelmed, and delighted when over 1700 people commented and entered Young House Love's wallflower blog contest ... with most of them clicking through to visit LaDiff's web page too.

A near-record breaker for TYH, and LaDiff has learned that when you don't dot EVERY i, weird stuff happens... more than the 'little' stuff. We thought we'd sell 12, maybe 20 sets... nonononono, we've had almost 100 requests for flowers & flutters since the contest premiered, and they are still coming in!

So... what went 'wrong'?

First, our vendor (Umbra) was out of stock on the white ones. No big deal, they'd have more in July, which was and is right around the corner, so no worries... yet.

Next, we find out that shipping these light weight but bulky little boxes ain't cheap. (Yes, we definitely should have figured that out beforehand) A few customers balked, understandably, so, we took the high road, and recommended them to other stores in their areas when we could!

Third - and this was a real surprise - our Umbra rep (shout out to John Grob, the best, most super wonderful gift & accessory rep out there) sends me a 'good news bad news' email. Good news: Umbra is reducing the price of the wallflowers & flutters. Cool... we'll pass on that new price asap! The bad news? To lower the price, they're changing the design: getting rid of the magnets and introducing a 'snap fit' feature. Now they can only be used on walls (no fridges or radiators or bulletin boards as Sherry & John had demonstrated). This news wasn't supposed to go out until June 24th, but John Grob, being John, fortunately found out early and released the info to us last week! Still... there were only about 3 sets presold that we could call & explain about the new 'snap fit' design. ...or so we thought!

#4 and this was the doozy! In updating our website to show the new 'snap fit' design and change the copy and pricing, I notice an odd number in quantity on hand: -57. How could this be? We've only had a few inquiries... Wait. Heart stops. We haven't seen ANY shopping cart orders. That's odd. Wait. Didn't another salesperson mention that customer concern about an unanswered email?... it was making sense now.

When the LaDiff website 'facelift' occurred on May 19th, the 'shopping cart' order emails had been frozen! they were NOT coming to anyone at LaDiff. No email...EGADS. And we were only catching it now - a month later!

side note... since we are not a point, click, BUY site, our customers can fill in a cart, then we follow up to complete the sale. Shopping cart orders come in about once for every 4 regular inquiries, so we hadn't noticed their absence (shame on us).

Okay - it's 5:30 on Friday night. I'm feeling beaten down and a bit stupid by not foreseeing and preventing all of these issues before they became problems (that's part of my self-written job description at LaDiff: foresee the weird stuff that MIGHT happen). Our graphic/web designer is now in Portland, OR, spending a surprise dad's day weekend with her family. Our web hosting consultant is about to leave for a week's vacation on Saturday morning. Frantic, we call everyone's cell phones and get the email problem resolved after discovering over 50 shopping cart orders waiting for follow up! And none of them knew that we had not seen them OR that the design had changed.

Valiantly, Tim and Jennie at LaDiff wrote a letter of explanation and contacted each customer individually, sorting through the orders. Our customers were very understanding (re-affirming my love of working with the public).

In the end, we've sent lots and lots of wallflowers and wallflutters to homes across America, with more to send when the backorder arrives.

Next time, you can bet your bottom dollar that ALL of our ducks will be in a tidy little row before our NEXT adventure like this. Thank you to John & Sherry of Young House Love for great traffic to the LaDiff website and for a GREAT learning experience! We cannot wait to do it again!

LaDiff contest through Young House Love

Last night, our new friends Sherry & John at Young House Love (who formerly went by another name... news of that on THEIR blog) posted a new CONTEST on their website/home improvement blog. LaDiff is the contest partner!

So far the response has been A-M-A-Z-I-N-G: over 1,000 entries in under 24 hours! A new record for them!

LaDiff is giving away THREE prizes: winner's choice of black or white WALLFLOWERS or a set of stainless steel WALLFLUTTERS from our friends at Umbra. (Selling price only $37/set!)


You can enter to win too by following this link to their site... GOOD LUCK! And if you don't win, at least you know where to buy a set... http://www.ladiff.com/!

It's always nice to see your name in print...

After quite a few 'tweets', several emails, and just a wee bit of pressure, we finally got the good-old-Richmond-Times-Dispatch to catch the story on the 3/50 Project.

Their angle was the Retail Merchants' Association teaser (shop local movement... coming soon!) with some good quotes from our friend, RMA president Nancy Thomas. And they did quote me (just no picture ... but maybe that's a good thing). Unfortunately, they were a little tiny bit weak about Cinda Baxter and the 3/50 Project website & mission and LaDiff's passion for the project.

Funnily enough, the story generated some good riled-up commentary afterward. (yes, of COURSE stp is yours truly... who else would it be?)

Check it out for yourself... right here... .
When you're done reading the story AND the comments (from the bottom up), I'd love to hear YOUR thoughts on how YOU are going to try to 'shop local'.

LaDIFF is helping the CARITAS Furniture Bank

October 1998... LaDIFF moved into our current digs - 6 months before the 'canal walk renovation project' was complete (it's celebrating its 10th anniversary this month).

When we moved into our 'new' space - all 45,000 square feet of it + warehouse + super cool indoor parking area - we knew we wanted to become "good corporate citizens." So... we started thinking about what we loved, appreciated, wanted to improve, etc.

In the last 10 years, LaDIFF has supported a variety of organizations, for various different reasons. While not all of our customers may support the same groups we do, that's not the point. The point was to reach out to the community and say "hey! we aren't just a big white box selling furniture. We're an old-renovated-brick-building-that-realizes-we-are-only-as-successful-as-the-community-we-support." We believe that part of being a good corporate citizen... heck, part of being a good CITIZEN period... is "giving back."

Through in-store fundraisers, hosted events, product donations, time donations, idea donations, and more, LaDIFF has delightfully become known as a 'community partner.' And we are darn proud of THAT reputation. Thanks, Richmond. (p.s. As a retailer, our contributions are generally time, product, or space... not money ... proving that even with that limitation you can make a difference.)

Which is why we are so pleased to be participating in a NEW event this fall, for a very worthy cause: a city-wide furniture drive for Richmond's only 'Furniture Bank', owned and operated by CARITAS. CARITAS partners with several Richmond-area organizations to ensure that after families receive housing, they also have beds where they can sleep and tables & chairs where they can eat. No child in Richmond should have to sleep on the floor. The dates of the drive are September 25th-October 5th. Much more news (and publicity!) will come for this later.

In the meantime, if YOU want to get involved with the furniture drive or any of the other organizations we've worked with, click on the link above or the links below and learn more.
Here are just a few of the groups we've supported over the years:

Art 180
East District Family Resource Center
Richmond SPCA
Noah's Children
Central Virginia Foodbank
Alzheimer's Association of Greater Richmond
Venture Richmond
American Cancer Society/Cure by Design

And so many more schools, causes, etc.

Get INVOLVED in your community by helping its most deserving yet most needy members.
Get INVOLVED in your community by helping it grow and by helping it improve and by spreading the word about how wonderful it is.
Shout out and embrace the potential within your community!
Share your success, your ideas, your talents with others, and karma... yes, karma... will bounce back around and improve your life ... and your business... even more.

We at LaDIFF live and believe this every day.
We hope you will, too.