5 posts from May 2008

Did you notice we've changed a bit? We've got a bit wider, got a snazzy new homepage (featuring some great photos from our fantastic customers) and best of all, we've made it easier to browse about and go shopping!

Yes, we've given Ready Made a bit of a facelift, which means it's now much easier to view designer packs of cards or stickers and treat yourself (or your friends) to something really special.

(Like these colourful NoteCards, from Kevin Meredith

or these retro pattern MiniCards, by Rachel Cave)

If you've never seen MOO Ready Made at all before, we will forgive you - it was a bit hidden. Basically, it's packs of cards or stickers designed by our wonderful designers. But rather than mixing and matching, you can buy complete packs, and personalise them as you would a pack made with your own images.

This is great for 2 main reasons I think...
1) Designer images are perfect for those times when you realise your own photos are rubbish - or if not rubbish, perhaps just not quite right.

You might take some lovely holiday snaps, but they're not always what you want to hand over to a potential new client. "Yes, call me, we'll do lunch. Here's a shot of me in a bikini... Oh no, err hang on. Me on a donkey? Yes, I'm a professional accountant, I just umm..."

2) Making personal gifts is really nice. A beautiful pack greeting cards for your mum, or slightly evil postcards for your brother is a great gift. Especially when you can add your own personal message to the back - which is big enough to make them feel special when they see it, but not so large they wont be able to use the cards for sending out to their own friends.

So do have a browse around, and see what our talented designers have been up to. But before you go, here's a few of my own favourites.

Colin Johnson MiniCards - bright, weird and wonderful!

Marc Johns Stickers - a whimsical look at life. (Makes me snigger.)

Nut and Bee Postcards, gentle, cute, and great for the young, or young at heart.

Andrea Joseph Greeting Cards. (Just the way I'd like to draw if I ever get off this computer!)

Puppies! By Fotolia - yes, I'm a 'dog person' - but there are kittens, for you weirdo 'cat people'...

We've moved! Not that far away from our previous office, but far enough to require a full investigation into local pubs and sandwich shops. I'll keep you posted if we find anything spectacular. Our previous office was very nice - host to a lot of food...

a lot of birthdays...

Some sad times...

And some happier times...

We packed MiniCard Holders there:

We locked our CTO in the cupboard and refused to let him out,

All in all, we worked really hard.

But now, on to bigger and better things! Look at all this space:

It's quite overwhelming...

Luckily we have tanks, to help with our global domination plan:

And, umm... this:

But, you know. We're sure it'll all be fine.

In the meantime, we have a new member of the MOO crew. The wonderful Julien - a special intern from France! He's helping out with our localisation, and marketing initiatives. He's also set up a French Facebook group for us, and he's keeping a French MOO blog, too.

But enough of me talking, I'll let Julien speak for himself...

Hi everyone!

So I'm Julien, and I'm working at MOO as an intern since the beginning of April. And I'm French! I study management in a French Business School which is also based in London. I've been living here since September, and will move to Paris next September. I don't come from Paris but from Nantes, a wonderful city close to the Atlantic Ocean. And I really miss it sometimes.

My role at MOO is to help the marketing team and to breathe life into the French MOOers' community. If you speak French (even just a few words, we don't mind!), just have a look at my blog, or at our Facebook group. Feel free to participate, leave a message or post pictures, to show the French all what you do with your cards and stickers!

Bonjour tout le monde!

Bienvenue à tous ! Je m'appelle donc Julien, et je suis stagiaire chez MOO depuis le début du mois d'avril. J'étudie dans une école de commerce française qui a aussi un campus à Londres, et j'habite donc à Londres depuis septembre dernier. Mais je viens de la belle ville de Nantes, qui d'ailleurs me manque beaucoup.

Mon rôle ici chez MOO est non seulement d'aider l'équipe marketing dans ses tâches quotidiennes, mais aussi de promouvoir MOO en France et de bâtir, avec vous, une communauté francophone autour de votre utilisation des MiniCards, StickerBooks et autres articles MOO. Vous pouvez donc me retrouver sur mon blog (pour en savoir plus sur MOO et moi, et vous!), ainsi que sur le groupe Facebook qui vous est dédié. N'hésitez pas à nous y rejoindre, et à laisser des messages, images, photos... Ce groupe est fait pour vous ! Vous pourrez également y retrouver les dernières actualités, en français, sur MOO.

As some of you might've already spotted, we've 'localised'! What does that mean? Well, it means MOO is now available in more than one language. Since launch, MOO has shipped to countries all over the world, and little-by-little we've been learning, so we can speak to you in your own language too.

So far, MOO has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish and German. If your browser is already set for one of these languages, it should automatically appear in the language of your choice. If it's not, you can switch languages by clicking the links at the bottom of every page.

As I've already mentioned, we are still learning, so if you spot something a bit odd please do let us know. We might be a bit embarrassed, but we'll do what we can to fix it!

In the mean time - welcome everyone! Pull up a chair, and make yourself feel at home.

-----

Eh oui, certains d'entre vous l'ont probablement déjà remarqué : nous avons procédé à la 'localisation' de notre site ! Qu'est-ce que ça veut dire ? Eh bien, maintenant MOO est disponible dans plusieurs langues. Depuis son lancement, MOO a expédié ses produits dans le monde entier et petit à petit, nous avons commencé à apprendre et désormais nous parlons votre langue.

A l'heure actuelle, MOO a été traduit en Français, Italien, Espagnol et Allemand. Si votre navigateur est déjà paramétré pour l'une de ces langues, le site devrait automatiquement s'afficher dans la langue de votre choix. Sinon, vous pouvez la sélectionner en cliquant sur l'un des liens en bas de chaque page.

Comme je l'ai déjà indiqué, nous continuons notre apprentissage alors si vous remarquez des trucs bizzares, n'hésitez pas à nous les signaler. Nous serons peut-être un peu gênés mais nous nous efforcerons de corriger cela !

D'ici là – bienvenue à tous ! Asseyez-vous et faites comme chez vous.

-----

Wie einige vielleicht schon bemerkt haben, ist unsere Seite jetzt übersetzt! Was das heißt? Naja, das heißt, dass es MOO jetzt in mehreren Sprachen gibt. Seit unserem Launch hat MOO seine Produkte in alle Welt verschickt, und wir haben immer ein bisschen dazu gelernt. Also können wir jetzt auch in deiner Sprache kommunizieren.

Bisher wurde MOO.com ins Französische, Italienische, Spanische und Deutsche übersetzt. Wenn du deinen Browser bereits für eine dieser Sprachen eingestellt hast, solltest du die Seite automatisch in der Sprache deiner Wahl lesen können. Wenn nicht, kannst du mittels der Links am Ende jeder Seite die Sprache ändern.

Wie schon erwähnt lernen wir noch. Wenn dir also irgendetwas merkwürdig erscheinen sollte, lass es uns bitte wissen. Das wäre uns zwar ein bisschen peinlich, aber wir tun natürlich was wir können, um den Fehler zu beheben!

Derweil heißen wir alle herzlich willkommen! Schnapp' dir einen Stuhl und fühl' dich wie zu Hause.

-----

Come alcuni avranno già notato, il nostro sito è stato "localizzato"! Ciò significa che MOO è ora disponibile in diverse lingue. A partire dall'inaugurazione del sito, MOO ha effettuato consegne in tutto il mondo e, poco a poco, ha imparato a parlare anche la tua lingua.

Finora, MOO è stato tradotto in francese, italiano, spagnolo e tedesco. Se il tuo browser è già impostato su una di queste lingue, il sito verrà automaticamente visualizzato nella lingua selezionata. In caso contrario, puoi cambiare la lingua facendo clic sui collegamenti visualizzati in fondo a ogni pagina.

Come abbiamo già detto, stiamo ancora perfezionando l'aspetto linguistico, quindi se trovi qualcosa di strano, ti preghiamo di segnalarcelo. Faremo tutto il possibile per risolvere il problema!

Nel frattempo, ti diamo un caloroso benvenuto! Qui ti sentirai come a casa tua.

-----

Como algunos de vosotros ya habréis notado, ¡hemos "localizado" nuestro sitio web! ¿Qué significa esto? Pues significa que MOO ahora está disponible en varios idiomas. Desde que empezamos, MOO ha realizado envíos a países de todo el mundo y, poco a poco, hemos ido aprendiendo, por lo que ahora también podemos ofrecerte nuestro servicio en tu idioma.

Hasta ahora, MOO se ha traducido a los siguientes idiomas: francés, italiano, español y alemán. Si tu explorador ya está establecido para alguno de estos idiomas, debería mostrarte automáticamente el sitio web en el idioma de tu elección. Si no es así, puedes cambiar de idioma haciendo clic en los enlaces al final de cada página.

Como ya hemos mencionado, todavía estamos aprendiendo, por lo que si detectas algo raro, te agradeceríamos que nos lo comunicaras. Nos sacarás los colores, pero haremos lo posible por arreglarlo.

Entretanto, ¡bienvenidos a todos! Poneos cómodos en vuestras sillas y sentiros como en casa.

Thanks so much to everyone who voted for MOO in the People's Voice Webby Awards! We're very pleased to announce that with your help, we won the People's Voice vote in the 'Services' category. It means a lot to us, because - panels aside - it's actually you (the people) we're doing this for.

So, champagne all round! Or in our case, at 10 in the morning in London, a cup of tea. We might even go crazy and grab ourselves a biscuit too! Cheers!

A few weeks ago we invited you all to take part in our Sticker Design Competition.  And you did, and how!  We had over 600 designs submitted to the competition over at Pixish, including designs, illustration, photographs and mixed media images.  

From the funny to the beautiful to the downright odd, we were delighted with the entries and had a tough time whittling down the list to our top 90 images.  But we did, and we'll soon be selling a limited edition StickerBook with the winning designs.  (Check back next week for an 'on sale now' announcement on the blog.)

The Grand Prize winner is Ines Maldonado with her 'moustache' design.  Ines has won £100 of Magma vouchers.  All the winners who have had one or more image selected to be in the StickerBook will get a Flickr Pro account, and will be e-mailed with their prize soon, so well done to everyone who won and thank you to everyone who took part.

The list of the winners are below*, and if you want to see which images have made it into the pack, pop over to Pixish and scroll through all the submitted images to find the ones flagged as winners.

*What a clever, creative bunch you all are.