An apology & some news!

OK, this is a bit long-winded but it goes a long way to explaining where things have been going wrong for Plastic Bat of late.

I have a big appology to make - my old site went down a few weeks back due to a complicated technical hurdle.  I was ill equipped to fix without spending masses of time (which I dont have) trying to figure it out or throwing cash (which I also can't spare) at someone else to fix for me so I decided to jump ship & start fresh with Shopify!

Basically, when I launched my first website for Plastic Bat (2005) sites like Shopify & Big Cartel etc. were either non existant or in their infancy, my only options were to plod on with Ebay - which was becoming over saturated with handmade jewellery - or to wing it with my own E-commerce soloution, I opted for the latter with Zen Cart.

I was HUGELY out of my comfort zone with Zen Cart, I had a lot of help setting it up & managed to tart it up a bit with some very basic CSS tweaks here and there - not before playing around with the PHP and mistakenly inserting an apostrophe which somehow negated EVERYTHING... seriously blank screen.. no website!!  Thankfully I managed to get past these initial ass pains & got everything working.  This was fine until any major changes need done or a problem arose, I was back at square one trying to remember how I did everything in the first place.

I struggled on like this for years, avoiding any major changes to the website or spending large sums hiring lovely people to fix my problems - not a soloution that was sustainable for my income level or one that I was comfortable with.  It was also affecting my ability to create, I put off doing work because it meant facing up to some really hard technical problems and so I lost my MOJO, my new output of late has consisted mainly of bunting necklace variants which is a total design cop-out. This has all been coupled with becoming a parent & learning all the stuff that comes along with it.  I could easily blame my recent down-turn on the poor economy but I have no-one to blame but myself, a hard thing to actually admit but I'm in a sharing mood!  But onwards and upwards, I'm feeling tons better about the business & I'm really looking forward to launching the new site! 

Soooo that brings us back to today, a fresh start on a new platform, armed & ready to make Plastic Bat bigger & better than ever.  Now that the website stress has been lifted from my shoulders (thanks Shopify!) I can now get back on with getting some new designs made,  I'm also looking to expand the brand with some fun unique pieces to liven up your living space including homewares and original art!

If you want to be kept in the loop about any of our upcoming launches, special offers or any other news please follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Thankyou for your patience during this transitional phase, we really appreciate your continuing support and look forward to serving you very soon!

Also even bigger thanks if you made it this far.   Rambling over!
Tracy x
AKA. The Big Kahuna at Plastic Bat