Today is a very big day for our very small company - we are finally moving from our old name, House of Display, to our new one - The Shop Company! This move has been in the works for the past few weeks and we have been working feverishly to get it done. Below, I would like to take this opportunity to give you a little background on who we were, who we are, and what we want to be.
who we were
Most of you reading this have never even heard of House of Display, so allow me to give an introduction. In late 2012, myself (Yoel Weiss) and Ben Friedman were entertaining the idea of entering the mannequin field. We had a contact and we felt the field was niche enough for us to enter. We started selling these mannequins on the marketplaces (ebay, amazon, etc.) and, at the same time, we were creating our own website - HouseofDisplay.com (I can code). Initial reception was very warm and to our many customers thus far we say: "we cannot thank you enough for your time, patience, and understanding. We would be nowhere without you!"
In this early stage, we quickly realized that we do not want to limit ourselves to that one field alone. You see, Ben and I are dreamers and we want to build something with the potential to be larger, to make a real difference. Also, and most importantly, many of customers needed a lot more than mannequins. But with a name like House of Display, we would be restricting ourselves to display products alone. In addition, House of Display sounded like something very fancy and fancy means expensive - which is precisely what we were not. We try to find the best products for the lowest prices. Thus, we set out to look for a new name
who we are
The Shop Company. We liked it from the start and its been growing even more on us ever since.
Once we got the name (and trust me - it was not easy -we have contemplated dozens of alternate names), instead of just switching out the names and hosts, we wanted to recreate the site to fix the many issues we noticed during the two months of running House of Display. Many of our visitors were using mobile devices (at night they made up the majority!) and our site was not optimized at all for mobile. It was also waaaay too slow. So we began to create our first responsive site - which means that the site will 'respond' and adjust itself according to the size of the screen viewing it. This was a significant amount of work. We also built it to be very fast.
We have also begun to increase our product selection into new categories. The search functionality of our site will be enhanced and we will add chat function to our customer service.
who we strive to become
We are passionate about a beautiful shopping experience so we will continue to find very useful, high quality, and affordable products for shops. More importantly, however, it is our goal to become a company known for its excellent customer service - easier said than done - but we have begun to dedicate ourselves to that difficult but attainable goal.