New suppliers, New colours, New products, New website, New year and a New blog.

Welcome to our new website.

Well, its almost the end of another year. This has been a year of major changes for us at Brickstorm.

After many years of frustrations, we have decided to move our business to a new supplier with a greater focus on quality and customer satisfaction. This has created a major shake up in all aspects of our business to say the least. Combined with this, we had a plummeting Aussie dollar exchange rate to deal with. Most of the transition has been completed now and we are selling the new stock from our new supplier except for a few barrow trays.

To coincide with the supplier change, we have new colours for our products. Our new products will be blue and white with a small amount of red. This replaces the old army green which was not as popular as we had hoped. As an amusing aside, when we decided to switch to the original army green colour a few years back, we launched in the same month that the federal government launched the plain packaging initiative for cigarette packets to help reduce the rates of smoking. I recall the then health minister in a press conference saying they had done extensive market research and found that 'army green' was the least positive product colour for sales that they could find. Not a great start for Brickstorms army green colours. The only green stock remaining is the Builders and the Brick barrow trays which we will continue with for most of 2016.

We are now almost complete with our transition to the new range of products. The quality is a step up, the new colours look great (especially compared to the army green), the improved design is much easier for the end user and also for assembly. The new designs are also much more robust than before with features like increased bolt sizes for the wheel barrows.

You may have also noticed that this is a completely revamped website. We have grown out of the previous home grown effort and now have signed up with bigcommerce.com to do our website. We can now do separate retail and wholesale sales, easier payment options and lots of clever features to display the products and present information. All this and it comes with a blogging feature too, which is how I came to be typing my first blog which you are now reading.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our wholesale and retail customers through 2015 for your valuable support and hope you all have a great Christmas and New Year break. We look forward to a positive and prosperous 2016.

Best Wishes for the New Year,

Rob Willis

BRICKSTORM