Chapter Nine – Nominations & knockbacks
Chapter Nine – Nominations & knockbacks. 2011 has flown by and will be remembered by us as the year we received three nominations in the greeting card industry awards, the prestigious Henries. Absolutely amazing as we’d never even won a £1 on a scratch card. We were up for Best Cute Range and Best Words and Sentiments with Rufus Rabbit and Best Fun, Trend or Graphic Range for our Silver Screen collection. Unfortunately we returned empty handed but were genuinely delighted to have been nominated and it gave us such a thrill to see our Little Dog logo popping up on the big screen alongside industry giants.
Other highlights included the reaction to our baby collection at the Autumn Fair which smashed all previous show records. Despite having previewed Little Rufus in the February it was early July before the bulk of the collection made it into the shops. Waiting months for the delayed stock to arrive was incredibly frustrating but the sell through and reorder response was truly uplifting and the team worked so hard to get all the stock out. It’s phenomenal what can be achieved by four dedicated individuals.
So much time, emotion and money has been invested in the young Rufus Rabbit and there is still a huge amount of work to be done but when we received the news that he’d been shortlisted in the baby category for the 2012 Gift of the Year awards we felt another surge of joy that we must be doing something right and as double bubble Brucie bonus our Little Dog pet treat tins became a finalist in the kitchen dining category.
And now for the knockbacks just in case you thought we were getting a little too full of ourselves! Our decade long relationship with the National Trust finally came to an end, sadly none of our new collections appealed. We were so disappointed but it has been an absolute honour and joy to supply the Trust for all these years and they have been a great company to deal with. Long live the Trust!
Then there was another well know British high street legend who decided after a very long review process that our rabbit rattle was not for them. They felt Little Rufus rabbit wasn’t gorgeous enough. Gutted!
And then of course one mustn’t forget the lowest of the lows when we had to issue our first ever product recall. Despite having trialled our pet collars for six months on our own scruffy mutts without any issues we had two complaints of the collars snapping. With the faulty collars returned we could see that the leather had literally snapped in the most random of places and we immediately suspected that the genuine leather wasn’t quite as genuine as claimed. Days later we received two more complaints and that sealed the issue. All collars were immediately recalled, a process that took over two days of phone calling and weeks of courier collections.
We were devastated. In our entire company’s history we have never put our name on something we didn’t believe was the very best it could be and to recall the collars was costly and shameful but our customers were so kind and understanding and all agreed it wasn’t worth taking a risk with anyone’s furry loved one.
And so the Little Dog enters 2012 with what some may call rather moderate ambitions.
To appear in every beautiful baby boutique around the world, to harness the marketing potential of social networks, (please forgive us our trespasses on Twitter and Facebook,) To master designing on the Applemac and burn to disc, to get married, to have a baby and to see you all safely back here this time next year.
