Web-based Shopping Shipping Challenge

Yes, it has become harder to find exciting, elegant and unique decor and accents for your home.

With the closing of many of the leading upscale decor stores, it is becoming almost impossible to consistently find quality items to decorate your home and office. The massive requirement for infrastructure investment for traditional stores, boutiques and shops has created an environment where these stores cannot operate profitably and are dramatically cutting back by either closing a significant number of their stores, or bankrupting completely. See Bombay and Kirkland's as two painful examples. If you do not live in or near a major city, you will soon be unable to decorate your house from anywhere but Wal-Mart.

The reduction in physical elegant home decor stores, however, has created a great opportunity for lean and efficient web-based decor retailers like Uptown La-de-da. We have seen interesting trends in sales over the past 6 months, and believe that we are perfectly positioned and capable of being the one-stop-shop for your elegant home decor and accessory items for North America.

No longer do you have to settle for what is left on the shelves of your local furniture store, but shop our incredible selection, buy online, and unwrap a few days later! And if you don't see what you are looking for, we always have buyers seeking your input and requests for new items, designers and product lines. Feel free to email us with your questions and suggestions - who knows, you may turn us on to an incredible emerging designer and we can all benefit from the Uptown La-de-da distribution network!

Our challenge, as is clearly and painfully felt by us all across the world right now, is the increase in fuel, and consequently, increase in shipping rates. Yes, our shipping rates have gone up slightly, but so have our sales. We have a great negotiated price with our shipping company, and pass as much of this along to our customers as we can without losing money on our transactions.

We ask that you work with us in particular on our shipping costs. Working with automated integrations to shipping calculations and product databases, we sometimes get shipping rate estimates, quotes or charges that are not consistent with what we are being charged.

If you are filling your shopping cart with our elegant home decor items and receive a questionable shipping estimate, please don't quit your cart and leave! Save your items and send us an email. We would be very happy to manually calculate shipping and adjust your purchase amount to accurately reflect shipping charges. At Uptown 70% of our shoppers return to buy more items. Giving you a great price and value for your money is very important to us. Thanks for reading, and have an Uptown La-de-da Day!

Uptown La-de-da Goes International!

The economic climate in the United States, the weak US Dollar, and great Uptown La-de-da prices have resulted in international pressure for our elegant home decor and accent items that we can no longer ignore. While we have always been successful in selling to Canada, we are now for the first time opening our stores sales to Europe and the UK!

Yes, affordable shipping of our delicate decor items is still a challenge, but we are working directly with USPS International Shipping to provide the best available shipping prices and service for our new European customers.

Thanks to all of our shoppers for continuing to allow us to grow and increase our offerings to the world ... Our own little way of making the world a little better ... decorated ;-)

Five Easy Ways to Transform a Room

Casa Cristina provides visitors to Cristinaonline.com with useful tips on home decorating and entertaining. This month Casa Cristina offers valuable decorating insights in the feature article:

Quick Change Artists – Five Easy Ways to Transform a Room

It’s that time of the year – the holidays are over, the winter doldrums have set in, and spring is still a long, cold way off. And, that’s exactly why it’s the perfect time of the year to change your personal scenery. If you’ve got a room, or even a whole house that’s just begging for a makeover, wait no linger! No need to call in the pros, though. These five quick solutions will convince you that a brand new look is at your fingertips.

1. Hit the walls!
Not literally, as in demolition, but with a luscious color. Of all the ways to give a room a fresh face, painting is one of the quickest, least expensive and most effective routes. It’s instant gratification in a can! Exploring color choices is easy too, as most paint companies now offer sample sizes. Take it home, splash it on the wall, and live with it a day or two. This small step will save you time and trouble in the long run. Color has a powerful effect on tour feelings, so consider the use of the room. Blues and greens have a calming effect, while reds rev us up, and pink is known to elicit an upbeat mood. Go from neutral to bold with an unexpected shade, or take baby steps by picking a color that is a deeper, richer version of the existing color. If the dining room has always been a deep, dark green, try a new perspective with a warm, light color. Either way, punch up any moldings by painting them a bright, semi-gloss white. Faux finishes and wallpaper are other quick fixes for tired walls. Bold, graphic patterns or barely visible textures, today’s wallpapers are a far cry from your granny’s cabbage roses.

2. Tap the Material World
Fabrics and textiles are the expressway to decorating heaven. Beautiful new bedding, chair covers, decorative pillows or drapes can make an amazing difference to any room. Keep the neutral living room, but throw in a stylish curve with zebra print pillows, a hot fuchsia throw, or a lavishly patterned footstool. Take the dining room from staid to spectacular in a snap with splashy new table linens and accessories. Boring bedroom? Rev ti up and create a stir with some fabulous new bedding. From dramatic colors and luxurious satins to simple, graphic patterns, beautiful bedding will make you and your bedroom feel rejuvenated.

3. Light the Way
Change the entire mood of a room with a flick fo the switch. Amp it up or tone it down, but use lighting to your best advantage. Banish gloomy shadows with the addition of floor and table lamps, or change a traditional dining room chandelier to cool rise and fall pendants. Some rooms, like kitchens and baths, require overhead, task specific lighting, but most other rooms benefit from the cozy glow of table and floor lamps. Branch out from white or ivory shades – switch to colored ones for an instant shot of color and style. One tip to keep in mind: for a balanced effect and effective light, the width of the shade should roughly equal the width of the lamp’s base.

4. Shake it Up
Take a room from predictable to provocative with a dash of contrast. Is the living room cool and contemporary? Add an antique accent table, a grandfather’s clock or a totally ornate mirror over the mantle to cause a stir. Bedroom blooming with floral prints and chintz? Quiet the riot of patterns with a sleek, solid accent chair, or rich, solid bedding. Never be afraid of mixing it up-style is not set in stone, and adding the element of surprise keeps it all the more exciting.
Unexpected combinations work well with color and fabric as well. For a room that’s primarily subtle in tone, introduce bold accessories in popping, punchy bright colors to wake up and shake up the room’s mood.

5. Plant an Idea
Call on nature to add a lush, organic feeling to any setting. From ultra-modern to traditional or Mediterranean decors, a magnificent plant creates a fresh focus. A soaring palm or miniature citrus tree adds summer’s warmth any time of the year. Add natural beauty to an entryway, or bring a burst of color to any room with flowering plants that bloom indoors. Choose brightly colored ceramic or glazed plant pots and you’ve got another way to add new interest to the room.

There you have it – five top ways to transform a room and gain a brand new decorating perspective. Most of these projects can be accomplished in a short period of time and are quite inexpensive, so no more excuses to keep staring at the same four walls. Grab your paint brush or hammer and get motivated!

Decorating Ideas for Girls Rooms

Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice!

Sugar and Spice

Every little girl I know loves pretty colors! For a room she'll cherish, select fabrics with flowers, trellises, cute animals, or butterflies. You might stencil flowers, vines, and butterflies on walls as a colorful accent, using paint colors matched to your fabric or wallpaper choices. Don't forget soft, airy curtains for the windows.

Ocean

If you live near the beach, or just wish you did, create an ocean theme using watery blues for the wall, sand colors on the floor, and clouds in the sky (ceiling). Take color cues from a beachy border wallpaper, art print, or piece of furniture like this colorful stool. You 'll almost be able to hear the waves!

Stars

Starlight is a great theme, and you'll find many fabrics, wallpapers, and bedding with star patterns. This theme appeals to both boys and girls, and is available in many colors both bright and pastel. Wonderful theme pieces can be the "star" in a room. You might get star-shaped rubber stamps (or sponges) and dip into wall paint to create your own starborder, decorate furniture, or make random stars all over the walls or ceiling. A star quilt or rug will complete the theme.

Moonlight

Create a wonderful, soft look with by the light of the moon. The ceiling might be midnight blue, with painted moon and stars, or use some of the stick-on glow-in-the-dark stars. Embellish a colorful painted bookshelf with crisp white stars, or liven up a plain white chest with a rainbow of star shapes. Find a moon and star quilt or fabric to use for window treatments. Then add a moon cutout headboard.Next: More Ideas for GIRLS Rooms including a look at colors, feline friends, and the very trendy butterfly.

Product photos courtesy of 'for Mercy's sake' -- all designs shown are copyrighted by 'for Mercy's sake, inc.'

Cottage Style and Fairies

Angels, Fairies, and Elves

This universal theme will be adored by girls of any age. Angel themes could use faux painted skies and clouds, fluffy canopy beds, and soft icy pinks, blues, and lavendars. Fairy shapes are appealing with transparent wings, sparkling wands, and silvery magic dust. Try to incorporate some sparkles with glittering accents, silver paint, and magical designs.

Flower Power

Bright and bold oranges, sun yellows, lime greens, and watermelon pinks are the basis of this retro-60's look. Find colorful borders and fabrics featuring stylized simple flower shapes in hot colors, and match these with some plain fabrics for ruffles, valances, and window seat pillows. These flower shapes would be easy to enlarge on a copy machine and trace onto the walls in random patterns, then paint with wild colors matched to the fabrics.

Sunshine

Paint a mural of hills, with the sunrise peeking over the top. Use sunny yellow checked bedding and quilts, green rugs for grass, and paint the ceiling a soft sky blue. Waking up will be easy and fun using this summery look which is sure to please many a young child.

Cottage Style

This is a great theme if your child will be using hand-me-down furniture for her room. Think lots of white and paint all the furniture for creating a cottage style room. Then use either light colors (pink, sky blue, pale green) or set the white off against bright clear colors like grass green or marine blue. You can also use fabric patterns such as tea-stained cotton florals, or use brighter florals, ginghams, or stripes. Find more tips on cottage style.

Butterflies, Bees, and Dogs

Color Themes

This theme is easy. Just pick the color that your little one LOVES, and go with it--everywhere. Paint the walls in her favorite color, then go for it in borders, fabrics, pillows, and accessories. Whether it is pink, purple, blue, or primary crayon colors -- your little one is sure to feel right at home in a colorful room done just for her.

Butterflies, Bees, and Dragonflies

Anyone who has purchased gifts for girls in the last few years knows that butterflies are big! If your little one loves this look, there are many ways to incorporate it into a room. A mural of garden and butterflies is a natural, or go with a butterfly fabric for the comforter. Small painted designs can be added to chair backs, picture frames, headboards, and flit around a colorful chest of drawers as well. Use butterfly hair clips to perch on a lampshade, bulletin board, or along one edge of a curtain.

Mary Engelbreit

You'll find lots of cute ideas for decorating a girl's room in the "Mary Engelbreit's Childrens Companion" book. Just find a photo you like and follow this whimsical artist's lead. Colorful walls, painted furniture, and stencil designs will give the room a smile. Then "don't look back," as Mary likes to say.

Cats, Dogs, and More

Cats, dogs, horses, bunnies, or other darling animals may be the perfect choice for an up-to-date girl's room. Certainly your little one has a favorite--or make it a menagerie if she can't decide. Choose from color themes in pastels, medium tones, brights, or primary colors, and use these happy designs on furniture, borders, and accessories.

Tea Parties and Princesses

Princesses and Castles

Your Princess can have a room befitting her high status if you use sheer fabrics and fanciful details. Embellish the walls with faux painted castle walls, murals, and blue skies for a truly memorable girl's room. Contrast the weighty look of faux stone walls with trails of stenciled ivy or flowers and swaths of pretty netting used as a bed canopy.

Tea Party

Pretty hats can adorn a room with a tea party theme. She can arrange her toy pals in chairs around a tea table and play til supper time. Be sure to include a pretty tea set and other tea themed accessories throughout the room. Cheerio!

Sports

Young girls who avidly participate in any sport -- whether it's riding, skating, softball, swimming, or soccer -- can readily identify with this decorating theme. Wallies or a wallpaper border is a perfect place to start for a color scheme and in a search for coordinating curtains and bedding. Look for innovative touches to support the theme and be sure to include display shelves to house awards, game photos, and medals.

Storybook Characters

Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit, the Little Mermaid, or Barbie might be the starting point for a wonderful theme room. Search the net for specialty character sheets and bedding, then take your color cues from there. Frame book illustrations as wall art or use cutouts of book pages for decoupage on furniture.

Toiles

The toile look has made a huge comeback in recent years and can help create a more sophisticated look for an older girl. Find this timeless design in fabrics and wallpapers, in colors that range from blue, red, green, black, and beige patterns on a white background, to newer iterations that incorporate multi-colors such as yellow and blue on white or ivory.
French RoomsBlack and white checks, vintage-look accessories, and any type of French poster or decoration can be just right for a fabulous Parisian bedroom. Learn more about creating a French room here.

Shabby Elegant

Tea-stained florals, comfortable slipcovered chairs, vintage accessories, and painted white furniture is the look that's all the rage. Explore the elements of a shabby elegant room here.
By now your decorating enthusiasm should up and running! You'll find more great ideas everywhere you look. Remember to include your child in this process of choosing a theme. Children have wonderful, innovative ideas, and seeing their wishes take shape in a wonderful room, created just for them, will give them confidence and a memory they will never forget.

article reprinted from Coral Nafie at about.com

Uptown La-de-da #1 for Elegant Home Decor

Uptown La-de-da (uptownladeda.com) is currently the top option for Elegant Home Décor, and third best in the world for elegant home accents. These rankings provided by Google ranking of web site keyword ranking for all web sites in the world.

While these rankings do not specifically indicate that Uptown La-de-da is the top selling or even best retailer in the world for décor and decorating, they do indicate a recognition by the top ranked analytical website ranking engine for the meticulous steps that Uptown La-de-da has executed in order to be recognized and ranked so highly. For instance, Uptown is ranked number 1 out of 1.57 million sites for searches on “elegant home décor”, and ranked number 3 out of 1.46 million sites for searches on “elegant home accents”.

Uptown Top Rankings RANK
• elegant home decor 1
• casa christina collection 1
• elegant home decorating 2
• elegant home accents 3
• casa cristina dinnerware 4
• designer accents 4
• casa cristina collection 5
• elegant home benches 5
• elegant home accents 6
• la de da 7
• ladeda 8
• deepdiscounts 10
• uptown whole sale 10
• casa christina 14
• home accent stores 20
• room decoration 30

“This hard-earned and fleeting distinction is truly an honor to us at Uptown La-de-da, where we have worked very hard at assembling and selling an outstanding collection of unique and elegant home décor accents, gifts and designer collections. We have placed a great emphasis on building our company the right way, with outstanding customer service, sales support, and even niche services like our personal shopper service, where our customers request items or line extensions that we currently do not stock. Our personal shoppers scour our network of sources to find and procure these items, and then we add them to our site for the benefit of our other selective customers;” says Lewis Kilby, Operations Officer and part owner of Uptown La-de-da.

Unique Offerings and Designer Focus
Uptown has uncovered a great niche position in the obscure world of web-based retail and has stayed true to the recurring theme of one stop shopping for all of your elegant decorator home accents and décor needs. The store also prominently carries leading and emerging designer items and lines that have fanatical customer followings.

“This past year, we have been extremely successful with our Tracy Porter and Casa Cristina collections. These products represent a significant portion of our overall sales, and we have loyal customers who continue to return to browse our new acquisitions of these lines and to order complimentary products. When we find and purchase new items, we personally contact our customers who are interested in these lines and help them to complete their collections, or add new décor items that compliment their previous purchases. I would say that 70% of our sales are to return or repeat customers;” indicates Uptown La-de-da President, Tracy Fedorwich.

Uptown La-de-da Web Statistics
The Uptown Web Statistics Executive overview for year to date 2007 indicates that nearly 25% of all of the traffic to the site is from returning customers. Almost all visits are from the United States, even though Uptown also does significant business in Canada. The average visitor will browse 11 pages on uptownladeda.com. In the dead of winter, typically a dead time for retail, the store has been receiving around 10,000 hits per month, with roughly 4,000 of those visitors actually browsing the products.

Uptown unexpectedly had a record sales month in January 2007. “This was totally unexpected,” states Lewis Kilby. “This was our largest sales month ever. We have continued the trend through February, and March is looking great as well. In retrospect, the January sales spike is probably from sales to our largest demographic, educated and affluent women aged 25 – 50, who did not receive what they wanted for Christmas, so went online and bought their own gifts from us.”

Web Retail Metrics and Benchmarks Revealed
We have not seen many web based retailers who will share their statistics with the world. This is a dark and murky area where many retailers may not be as professional or experienced with corporate business as the large and entrenched brick and mortar retailers. It is extremely difficult to benchmark performance and to gauge how well you are performing against an expected result. With no published or easily accessible statistics, it is difficult to understand how a site is performing: what to adjust to increase close rates (shoppers who buy versus browse), or if your site is outperforming or underperforming similar company sales as a percentage of visits.

“The best thing is just to compete with yourself. Always strive to increase the close rates, increase traffic, and listen to your customers who will talk to you about their site shopping experience,” recommends Lewis Kilby. “We continue to improve the products, lines, marketing and shopping experience for our customers. We will be the one stop shop for elegant home décor and accents. Thanks for shopping and we hope to see you real soon!”

Uptown La-de-da (uptownladeda.com) is a web-based wholesaler and retailer of elegant home accents and designer décor based in Smyrna, GA. Uptown is a wholly owned subsidiary of eChain Technology Group, LLC., which specializes in enterprise solution design and supply chain optimization business consulting worldwide.

Buy your Tracy Porter now!

It is with heavy heart that we wish a fond farewell and best luck to our Tracy Porter line. Tracy Porter Collection was a huge part of our success last year, and is a defining designer of 2006/2007. But as these products gain mainstream adoption, we must continue to diligently look for the next great designer and latest emerging trends in home accents and decor to keep our loyal customers coming back.

You can now find Tracy Porter at Bloomingdale's and even Target. As a niche boutique, we cannot continue to provide our customers with the pricing that we seek for these items unless we can find alternate sources for these great products.

As purveyor of the ornate and ostentatious, we love Tracy Porter's bold colors, oversized dimensions and outlandish designs. We have diligently added over 400 new products to help offset the pending loss of the Tracy Porter Line, and continue to aggressively seek the newest, coolest and hottest new items to fill out our selection.

We have already phased-out many of the Porter items that are no longer available, and what we have left is going very fast. So if you were thinking of buying Tracy Porter from Uptown La-de-da, please do so now!

Thanks and happy shopping from Uptown La-de-da!

Goodbye Toys!

We tried to sell baby and children's toys, games and other various and sundry non-decorative items for the young. We have decided to eliminate this entire line from our site. The test was a dismal failure! We expect that very few of you have even noticed ;-)

Last year we decided to add around 1,000 baby and child items to test a line extension for our primary demographic. We found out quite clearly that our customers are not really interested in toys or baby gifts, and we have responded.

We have liquidated the entire line to free up more of our focus and warehouse space for our core offering: decorative accents and decor for the Uptown Designer Home.

Thanks to those of you who purchased toys from us, but from now on, you will have to shop elsewhere. Sorry.

Now, for the other 99.7 percent who shop our main line, you may have already noticed that we have added TONS of new items that you are going to LOVE!

More on the next Blog entry regarding January sales...