We are pleased to celebrate the start of the school summer holidays with a 10% off weekend for all items on our website when you enter evoucher code HB2YF13 in the checkout.

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Just returned from Spring Fair 2011 in Brimingham and found some new interesting products which we will be featuring on our site soon…more information to follow.

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Well we thought that it was going to be a close run thing between the Evasolo dressing shaker and the Bosign bath wine glassholder but excitement is gathering at Homebits HQ as we can now see that what we thought were sure fire winners are loosing ground. 

Coming on the outside are the Evasolo oil and vinegar carafe, the Nuance wine finer and the Stelton cigarette case - I wish I had backed one of these, instead I opted for the Trudeau gravy seperator - so it looks like Hannah in our office is going to win although there are a couple of weeks to go before Christmas!!

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Funny old time of year really, we find people go mad each year for one or two products  and this year is no different, not that we are complaining but I often wonder why.

We had the year of the Evasolo Grating Bucket in fact that developed into a Worldwide grating bucket shortage, a real drama as I remember; you didn’t know? Well I don’t think it made headline news, but a lot of people needed a calming phonecall responses letting them down gently and assuring them that life will not end if they don’t get a grating bucket in time for Christmas. So,you thought all we did by phone was describe products and take down card or address details when necessary.

One of the reasons I love this job is the people and there is nothing quite like having a laugh with a cheery soul on the other end of the line. People think that internet shopping is a faceless experience but actually a large number of internet shops have really nice teams of  people running them who are more than happy to help or chat about things even if they have nothing to do with the order. Yes I know you are going to say what about the not so good tempered calls, they can’t be a nice experience, well no truthfully sometimes they are not but I find a genuine apology if we have not managed to fulfil their wishes, for whatever reason, does help a lot; and of course having empathy with the customer also helps. If  I am the customer and I have a question I will usually pick up the phone to an internet shop and talk to the humans at the other end if I can.  I do all my Christmas shopping online because I have no time to get out, the variety of choice is better and I hate standing for hours waiting to pay.

If this weather is set to continue, Christmas on the high street is going to be a cold toes outside, far  too hot in your big padded coat inside experience and the best you can say about the latter  is you suddenly have  sympathy for all women of menopausal age. Boy its going to be a long winter if the snow has come already; it is predicted by some to be coldest winter in Europe for 1000 years and the dawn of a new ice age (although I am sure the UK had a mini ice age in the last Elizabeth’s reign when the Thames froze over thick enough to build bonfires; if I remember my history?) all because the Gulf Stream, that keeps these shores ice free, is slowing down. Well we will have to watch this space;  I remember other past  predictions that the oil would run out by the year 2000.  However snow can also be fun, one of our courier drivers (the fonts of all knowledge about what’s going on) said he had already delivered dozens of toboggans this week. I am glad to see people preparing to enjoy it and if  this early snow trend continues we may not have to go out of the UK for a decent ski holiday; any boost to UK business is welcome to us all.

No don’t worry, I am not actually going to burst into a song about silver linings!

With the current weather in mind you would think that our nifty selection of Stelton designer car ice and snow scrapers would be the number one gift. I am lucky enough to be able to walk to work as the office is about five minutes away from home but I have complete sympathy with all of you out there on dark cold mornings scraping snow and ice off your cars often with no more than a supermarket loyalty card and freezing fingers because you mislaid your gloves and you are late already.  In another lifetime I was commuting 100 miles a day on motorways to work so I have direct experience of all of  this; thankfully a long time ago now.  I heard on TV the other day that it is actually an offence to leave snow on the roof of your car and drive it around! I  never realised this, it is something to do with it slipping off when you brake and either blocking your vision or blowing off your roof and blocking the vision of  another car; you live and learn.  I wonder how they clear the tops of lorrys and double decker buses? I grew up in Southern Scotland in a valley called Eskdalemuir 17 miles north of Lockerbie into the hills and heavy snow and ice was just part of our normal winter life there; we were often snowed into the valley for a week or more at a time and looking at the weather map it may well be like that there right now. I wonder how often we drove around with snow on the roof? Not so many cars up there though.

Well I know you are all agog to know which paticular items are our number one best sellers this Christmas because you are still reading this blog. Not the obvious ice scrapers but it does indicate either that the British public have finally responded to the last decade or so of healthy salad eating mantras and they are already looking forward to the Summer next year. Or, alternatively, that they want to stay indoors in the warm and sit out the coming “ice age” in a nice warm relaxing bath.

You choose.

The winners are both Danish design, a dressing shaker from evasolo and a wineglass support for your bath from Bosign that are flying off the shelf right now.

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Well Gail back again, here we are in the thick of winter weather with Christmas just around the corner. Such a dreary day I thought I would share a funny story with you. It never ceases to amaze me that people often phone up to try to place orders by phone. We generally try to discourage this as we have the latest security systems in place to make sure that we do not actually see any of your card details which are stored by the bank until we take the money for the order.

However there are those who would rather give their  details over the phone to the nice person on the other end even though they have never met them. We are an honest crew at Homebits but it should be more comfort to know our automated systems are actually secure. Of course there will be occasions when we have to take details and we have little books that we shred page by page as the orders proceed, we never keep the details as you will know if you have tried to add to an order taken this way.

There are many reasons for needing the phone option, there are people with techno fear who cannot cope with web buying,  there are those who are not online who are told by others  about the products and there are some who are just a tad lazy………………..

However I was speaking to a buyer in France the other day;   he said ” could I buy it over the phone ?” so I said my usual “is there a problem with online?” to which he replied “my cat has peed on my keyboard” Good one!

I suppose to a cat it can be confusing?

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Well today is really exiting for us here, if you go to our site you will find we have added a new brand to the site. Some items from a brand name d line are for the first time in their history available online exclusively at Homebits. To those of you who are in the design world d line is well known worldwide and it is associated with a large number of the worlds most celebrated architectural projects. Anybody who does not know this story please read on. 

Professor Knud Holscher

d line handle

You have to go back to 1971 to chart the history of d line as a player in the history of late twentieth century minimalist architectural design. Minimalism was the key to the initial concept which was based on the tube. The technical ability to bend a tube very precisely while keeping  the  continuity of the radius within the bend gave clean commitment to the shape and form and thus it led to the birth of this ground breaking design. Initially two lever handles were designed with 14mm diameter stainless steel tubing the first one in a U shape and following on from that  one in a L shape. These may look familiar to you today as you walk through  all our modern buildings but remember these were the very first, the originals and this was really new and exiting, especially for the young up and coming architects of the day among which  Lord Norman Foster and Lord Richard Rogers may be just two names you now recognise. 

Indeed the Danish designer Professor Knud Holscher was also one of the young architects of the day and his d line concept of the ‘ total solution’ to ironmongery within a building was a consequence of  his development of this range. Prior to this when he was the supervising architect on Arne Jacobsen’s design for the (now grade one listed) 1960′s  St Catherines College Oxford he had found it annoying to have to look in so many catalogues to find every piece of ironmongery to make the building work.  This lack of coordination added to his sentiment “simple ironmongery is to a building what buttons are to a shirt – both accentuate colour and design qualities when they are elegant , but disturb the unity if they are gaudy“.  The ‘total solution’ was born and over the next years the concept was developed to include, as well as hardware, washroom, signage and handrailing. The brand then grew to be an accepted icon of minimalist modernist design. This led to what we now call a  strap line “on show in fine buildings” for d line from the UK company Elementer Industrial Design who worked closely with both d line and UK architects over many years and who were the first company to bring  d line into the UK . 

Well  as I mentioned above you will now be able to buy some of these iconic objects on the Homebits site as from today, we are all excited about it and hope you are too. This shows you our overall concept for Homebits of bringing together items of good and sometimes renowned and iconic design in a one stop shop. We will continue to persue this and we will be adding other brands to the site in the near future. 

By the way you will find other Knud Holscher designs on our site already; we have a range of pure solid beech wood homeware branded Scanwood that is worth a quick look.

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Today Homebits can announce that they now sell  the Knud Holscher Danish Design dline bathroom fittings on-line (other products to follow) as a world exclusive.  The d-line range has been used on prestige buildings and residential developments worldwide – If you are into design then you know this brand

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Had a customer on today who had an old lever key lock on his door and wanted a designer swing cover  which we just happen to do, sold quite a few already since launch at the beginning of this month

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Homebits are now on Technorati, Twitter and Facebook

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Hello world! The Homebits blog is up and running. First off let me introduce ourselves and tell you how our Homebits online shop was born. We have been running a service to architects and designers for many years sourcing designer hardware for building projects. This is hardware in the strictly non IT sense which basically in laymans terms means door and window fittings, the general term for this industry is Architectural Ironmongery but we thought we would explain this as not many people outside the industry know the term and often think we are blacksmiths making black iron garden fittings or gates. We soon branched out from doors and windows into bathroom fittings and front door accessories. At exhibitions we were often asked where our shop was because as the exhibits all had the same look and feel; people actually thought that we were the manufacturers. In fact we had taken a lot of time and trouble to source our products from outside the UK and we admit to a certain personal choice bias towards the design of the goods we chose to represent. This leads me back to the shop idea, we did not have a shop but kept thinking about it and eventually we decided the best thing would be to develop an online shop in order to make our product offering more readily accessible to the world beyond architects and designers in London. Yes we know there is a world beyond this and we wanted to reach you all. When planning the site we knew we had a good and in some cases exclusive offering of designer door,window and bathroom accessories but slowly the seed of an idea grew that we wanted to do more than that. We are quite passionate about design and we have a long standing family association with things Danish and therefore by default a love of Danish design. So when we looked at the home from the point of it’s design accessories we thought that door handles were essential but only a part of the story, what about some other fun design accessories for the site? This gave us the basic concept of Homebits where you can buy things for your front door or any other home makeover but by the way look in the other sections of the site they have really nice coffee pots from Eva Solo and Stelton which are major brands in Denmark. We launched the site with a small offering of products which has steadily grown and will continue to grow as we add to the brands represented on the site.

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