The team at Glowsticks Ltd are passionate about delivering products and services to people in the most efficient, easy to use and friendly way possible. Customer service and low cost are our highest priority! Have you experienced that moment talking to a big corporate company where what they are saying to you makes no logical sense? We have and never want this to happen for any of our customers. We’ve had such great feedback from our customers regarding our service values and price, that we are continually being asked to provide new products for them, and we will also make sure these products make it online at great prices available for you too!

Our mission is to be the No 1 glow stick and LED product provider for Australasia, which we have already achieved in New Zealand and are well on the way there for Australia too! We know that there are products that you use that are either too expensive or delivered by companies that don’t really care about you like we do. Tell us what these products are! We can then source them in the cheapest possible way and bring them to you in an easy to purchase, high quality range.

Comment below on what products you would like to see! These can be anything, (from glowsticks, LED products to stationery, tools, etc..) what do you use lots of that you would love us to make available to you? What price would you like to see them available for? Let us know and if we get enough comments we’ll get busy sourcing them for you. So make sure you let us know what you want.

So make sure you let us know what you want.

Also heads up, we have some exciting expansion news to come soon. Further details at a later date..

Place your comments below to let us know what you want to see:

Light Tent, Perfect for creating Studio Quality Lighting.

Quality photography of products and services is quickly becoming a key selling point for online retailers. Yet, so many websites selling products have very poor quality photographs.

It’s true that photographing glow sticks in the dark requires more care and attention than photographing products in natural light, however we have developed a number of techniques to get bright, clear shots of our product.

Firstly (and most importantly), we use a High Quality Camera. A Digital SLR, which has a large lense and is able to capture a large amount of light. One of the most common problems with photo’s taken in low light settings is grainy-ness. If you have ever tried taking a photo of a Glow Stick using an iPhone or Point-And-Shoot you’ll know that when the photo is blown up on a computer it looks terrible. This is simply because the number of photons hitting the cameras sensor are so few and far between that you end up with ‘speckly’ photographs.

Secondly, we use a tripod and long exposure times. It’s near impossible to hold a camera steady for anything longer than 1/30th of a second. Typically we will take shots for 1-2 seconds at a time.

Thirdly, we use a dark, matte background, and if we are photographing Chemical Glow Sticks (regular glow sticks), we will use Ultra Violet Light to make them glow. This means we can setup a shoot and photograph product without actually ‘cracking’ any of the glow sticks, and it means if the shoot takes a long time we are not having to photograph a gradually dimming product.

It’s amazing how much differnce the background can make, take these three shots for example:

The survival glow stick with very bright lighting inside the light tent.

The survival stick in the same place, with the lighting turned off.

The survival Glow Stick on a matte black surface (still inside the light tent) without any other lighting.

For products which are shot in light we use a light-tent. By applying a small amount of exposure compensation (overexposure) we are able to remove almost every detail from the background to produce a high quality product photograph. Take for example our new Facepaints which are now stocked in Woolworths, Countdown and Foodtown New Zealand.

Support Your Team Face Paint Product Photograph as used on the website: www.supportyourteam.co.nz

We have even started filming our product videos inside the light tent, it provides professional quality lighting and a beautiful white background which really shows up our products.

October 2008, Individually Wrapping 10,000 6" Glow Sticks

We needed capital, fast.

Having come home from Canada with pockets empty, Glowsticks LTD would only survive if we could source the funds needed to bring in another shipment of stock. The business had been shut down between December and Febuary, in our haste to leave we had made very few provisions should anyone want to order while we were away. We sent stock from Wellington to Taupo so my father, Bernard Fletcher, could handle sending out orders while we were gone. Unfortunately, what we had sent to Taupo was very little, and that was all we had left.

There was good news, however. While in Canada we had spent our rest days in front of a laptop, writing code, sorting images and putting together the Glowsticks LTD website which went live days after our return from the Northern Hemisphere.

After some discussion, loans from parents and family proceeded, and by April 2008, Glowsticks LTD was back in full operation. Sales continued to increase and for a time we gave up selling items on Trademe due to the work required to process them (for more info see another blog post ‘The Trouble with Trademe’), however ultimately resumed once we discovered a much faster processing method.

Up until June 2008 Glowsticks LTD only sold two products, the Tricolour 6mm Bracelets and Assorted 5mm Bracelets. We then added Individually Wrapped 6″ Glow Sticks and Bulk Wrapped 6″ Glow Sticks. It was around this time we secured a deal with a long time Christchurch-Based glow stick seller ‘MISH’, who was, and still is one of our largest competitors. We supplied them with all of their 5mm Glow Bracelets, an arrangement which carried on into 2009.

Throughout the year we were in contact with The Warehouse to arrange supply for the coming Halloween/Guy Fawkes. Unfortunately the purchaser for these products had changed since 2007 and the new purchaser was very  disorganised. Having delayed making a response until shipping items from China was no longer an option, The Warehouse asked if we were still able to supply them with Individually Wrapped 6″ Glow Sticks.  This presented a problem because we didn’t have enough, we only had Bulk Wrapped 6″ Glow Sticks. We had two options – Airmail Individually Wrapped Glow Sticks in from China, which is very expensive and would cause the deal to run at a loss. Or, pack 10,000 Bulk Wrapped 6″ Glow Sticks into Individual Bags ourselves. Yes, we said. We could supply them.

10,000 foilbags were airmailed to us from China, we purchased a sealing machine and in early October the two of us undertook a grueling experience, packaging 10,000 Bulk Wrapped Glow Sticks into Individual Bags. It was intense, finger blistering work, and it was made harder by the fact that we were in University Study Leave, and should have been preparing for our third year exams.

The novelty of what we were doing wore off after we sealed the first bag. And we still had 42 more hours to go, condensed into three 14hr days. 12 months ago an order from The Warehouse had been exciting, rewarding and fun. This time it was far less rewarding, it wasn’t exciting, and it certainly wasn’t fun.

The job may have been a bit too much because as we came into sealing the final thousand bags Ben said he wanted to sell out his half of the business and would be leaving New Zealand in November.

My heart sank. I’d no longer be working with one of my best friends, Glowsticks LTD would have nowhere to store it’s product and I’d be back running the business by myself, which was now turning over around $100,000 – and I would have my University Honours year to contend with also.

Ben, putting Bulk Wrapped 6" Glow Sticks into Individual Foil bags.

Vincent Fletcher, Ben Matthews - Invermere, Canada, Jan 2008

The decision to swtich Glow Sticks from a small business run under my own name, to an incorporated company with two equal shareholders sprang from three key reasons.

1. I was desperately running out of space to store the product. With my bedroom already filled with Xbox, PS2 and Wii consoles and parts for my X-mods business (which I sold in November 2007). I then added a large PA System, Road Cases, Equalizers, Stage Lighting and Stands to the mix, hanging from hooks on my walls and roof (these ended up in another business,  Audiosave). There was little/no space to walk around, let alone lie down for a nights sleep. In fact, at one point my mattress was propped up about 1.5m high ontop of several boxes of 5mm Assorted Glow Sticks because there literally was no where else to store them! (I think my flatmates will also remember a phase in which the walls of our hallway were linedwith 100,000 paintballs.. a failed venture).
2. The time required to organise the orders, then pack and send them was simply too great, especially given my full-time university commitments and commitments to my other business.
3. I needed someone else who could go on a snowboarding trip with me to Canada.

Ben came on board and we only had one ambition. To earn enough money between July 2007 and November 2007 that both of us could treat ourselves to a 2 month snowboarding excursion.
Sales picked up almost immediately. It was as if by overnight, forming a company had doubled our exposure. Coming into September 2007 we landed a huge deal with The Warehouse to supply $30,000 worth of product in time Guy Fawkes. Having only been in business three months we had already earned the $’s required for our trip.

In November of 2007 I went to China to visit manufacturers and suppliers, to checkup on product quality and make new connections. Then, after a could of weeks back in New Zealand Ben and I left for Canada on Boxing Day. Neither of us really understood the full meaning of what we had achieved. In 5 short months we had managed to build a business, a customer base, and now a 2 month long holiday, and Glowsticks LTD still didn’t have a website….

However, by the time we got back in February 2008, we were both broke, Glowsticks LTD was in debt, and we had run out of stock.

However, as a seller who sells around 20-30 items per week on the service, I must say that it is seriously lacking behind eBay in features and facilities for those who sell in large quantities.

Trademe takes too much time. Plain and simple. Logging in, checking your listings, having to move purchases from the trademe system into our own website system, it all takes far too much time. Unlike eBay, Trademe does not contain an ‘Application Programming Interface’ (API) which means that you cannot have another system (such as your regular website) connect to trademe to share data. In our business, all orders are handled through our website. We have a special login where we can view orders, print invoices, scan parcels and update prices. This is fine for usual orders which customers place through the website, however if they order from us on Trademe, the data has to be entered into the database manually. Time consuming, repetitive, boring.

‘My Products’ in Trademe is a new service, and a band-aid for something eBay has been doing this for years. For a high volume seller in eBay it is easy, you simply list an auction, set that you have XX quantity, tell it it should never expire and it just carries on forever – when someone purchases the auction/listing does not close, it carries on. Plus you have an API which makes getting the data into our website easy and consistent. Wow, it’s so simple!
With trademe however, up until ‘My Products’ were released a couple of months back, every auction had to be manually handled. If it expired, you had to relist it. If you wanted to offer the items to watchers, you had to do this manually too. If you didn’t want to do all of this, you could go and pay someone else for rediculously priced subscription service such as ‘EasyLister‘ or ‘Auctionitis‘, services which are actually disallowed in Trademe terms and conditions, however then you would be stuck using their service instead. (I once asked Snipesoft about an interface between their service and our existing website, they were not interested..)

So, I recently wrote a web-scraper to take some of this repetition from handling Trademe orders. Basically this is a program which pretends to be a web browser. It logs into trademe as a regular user would and then downloads all of the sales in a csv file (Excel Spreadsheet style file). The CSV file is then used to enter data into our database. Basically, this allows us to automatically transfer trademe sales into our own website. However, this is not a particularly nice way of doing things. It is a real cludge, but it works. If anyone is interested in the code let me know and i’ll e-mail it to you so you can take some of the work out of your own trademe sales. Interestingly, although it only took a day or so to write, I think that this is actually the basis of the easylister and auctionitis software? Perhaps someone will read this and correct me if I am wrong.

I would continue to rant, but I just heard Sella is working on an API…. see you later Trademe.

I began listing the product on Trademe, for cost price, which was actually very high due to the fact that they had been airmailed in from China in a hurry.

A few weeks into the listings, sales were trickeling along and I was happy to be slowly ridding myself of the product. It was here that my mother, Sandra Fletcher, a Primary School teacher in Taupo suggested contacting schools and seeing if they were interested in the product for fundraising at discos. I had no idea how to get in touch with them, but Sandy had a book of every school in New Zealand. So a, Glow Sticks business was born.

She began faxing a flier to various primary schools around New Zealand, generally while watching Coronation Street, and within a few weeks had managed to get through to about 600 schools. After a couple more weeks orders began to pick up, and then they picked up some more. By the time I was down to having half of my original 19,600 glow bracelets, I had decided that perhaps glow sticks wern’t such a bad idea after all, and, if the next lot were freighted into the country rather than airmailed, there would actually be a profit in the business. It was now June and I placed another order, another 20,000, but this time had them sea freighted to New Zealand. 6 weeks later they arrived, and not a moment too soon, the last ones had been sent out a couple of days before and it were looking like I was going to have to start turning customers away.

As word of mouth between teachers, PTA’s and other groups took hold, the business picked up. By the end of the year I had sold just under 80,000 glow bracelets with the last shipment (in September) containing  40,000. In 2007 the business continued to grow, still without a website, schools would phone/e-mail/post in their orders and pay once they had arrived. The payment on invoice system really sprung from the fact that inititally I was so happy to be selling the products I didn’t worry too much about whether people had paid, it turned out that that suited schools which often have quite old-school (excuse the pun) accounting systems and can only pay with a cheque.

In the middle of 2007 glow sticks had grown to a size where I realised that It would be difficult to continue to store all of the stock in my bedroom in Wellington. So, I convinced my university friend Ben Matthews to join me and with an investment of just $2600 each, we formed, ‘Glowsticks LTD’.

How’d this happen? Well, since we started offering the Assorted 6″ Bulk Wrapped Glow Sticks, the sales of single colours dropped right off. So, here we are making up boxes of 50 assorted.

Converting Single Colour to Assorted

The packaging is a little different, and the pricing is a quite alot higher, but if your in a tight spot, look no further!

30pcs 5mm Bracelet Pack, Individually Wrapped 6", 3pcs 5mm Bracelet

40cm Jumbo Glow Stick

Personally, I spend very little time in one place (or near one computer) and I am often replying to e-mails and managing orders from my iPhone, my laptop or in some cases other peoples computers. So when I heard that a New Zealand company (Wellington based) had developed an online accounting package, I was instantly drawn toward the idea.

Straight away I knew this would address several issues:

1. The syncronisation issues I mentioned above relating to using the accounts in more than one place – now you simply log into a website and all your accounts are housed there
2. Multiple people can have easy access to the accounts, Bernard (who runs Glow Sticks NZ from Taupo) can enter in purchases, as can I from my residence in Sydney Australia. Not to mention, when your accountant needs to access / touch-up your accounting, they can just log in and do it, you don’t even need to e-mail them anything and from then on the changes will be in there.

I had been wanting to try and promote this software, Xero on this blog, so when they e-mailed me yesterday to say that they were offering people a free trial until November 1st, I thought it would be a good time to let others know.

Xero is easy. Really Easy. You can set it up to automatically get your Bank Statements from the Bank which you can then reconcile in the program by simply clicking ‘OK’. It is able to match banking transactions with purchases and sales that you have entered so in most cases you can fly through it. For example, on Monday Night I reconciled my Australian accounts from July 1 to Sept 12, it literally took around 30 minutes. Xero also interfaces perfectly with PayPal, a service we use a lot both in New Zealand and Australia for accepting Credit Card payments. Believe me, i still don’t really know when something is a debit, or something is a credit, but with Xero I don’t have to.

Is it expensive? Well.. I guess that depends on your definition.
Currently we pay $50/month ($600/yr). There are no up-front costs, and there are no hidden costs related to upgrades, it is all included. Personally I think this is slightly on the expensive side, however I am very busy and value my time so the fact that Xero actually makes it easy and fast for me to do my accounting makes me happy to pay the extra few hundred dollars a year. Plus, since it handles gathering the statements for me, if I have a few spare minutes for some weird reason I am actually drawn to the site so I can just quickly reconcile a few things, getting on top of it before the end of the year comes… it’s kinda addictive and fun.

So, if you go to Xero and signup using this promotion code: 8QQCJW
You’ll get to use it free till November 1st, and if your still using it when 2011 rolls around, we (glowsticksltd) will get a free month out of Xero too.

Give it a go, if your a small business and have no issues switching accounting platforms you’ll honestly find it one of the most time-saving decisions you ever made. It even beats spreadsheets.