Meet the team!

Hi all!

We've had the blog running for a few months now and we've had the business running for even longer. In fact celebrated our 4th birthday this year!

We thought it was about time we gave you a (semi-)formal introduction to the members of Funky Monkey Pants.

Emma - Founder of Funky Monkey Pants

Emma at her desk before it was buried in paper work.

Without Emma there simply wouldn't be a Funky Monkey Pants and we'd all be a little worse off. Emma was a big fan of cloth nappies and decided that she wanted to share the wonderful world of cloth with others. As for the name, that was inspired by a cloth nappy covered in monkeys. Those were some funky pants indeed.
     Emma is very dedicated to providing the best products for everyone and will often go out of her way to help a customer, she loves to give advice and help you get the best nappy for your needs.
     When she's not busy packing orders, Emma usually finds herself trapped behind a fortress of paper work slowly chipping away at figures. She never sounds keen to do it but these things have to be done!

Emma likes:

Chocolate

Volkswagen Beetles & Camper vans

Spending time with her children

Emma Dislikes:

Rustling bags

Fruit

Un-environmentally friendly things

Favourite Nappy: Bottom Bumpers

Bill (Adult Bill) - Social Media & Marketing Coordinator

Bill Dressed as a Rebel Pilot.

You may be able to guess that Bill was given the freedom to choose him own job title, Emma was going for "Dogsbody" but "Social Media & Marketing Coordinator" has a more important sound to it.
      Bill graduated from university last year with a Bachelor of Arts degree and felt incredibly lucky when an opportunity for work in a relevant field appeared. Having initially been hired on a 4 to 8 week work experience trial, his unrelenting dedication and efficiency led Emma to keep him on as an official employee.
     Bill spends his time updating the site, creating images for us to use and managing the social media aspects of the business.

Bill Likes:

Comics

Computers

Fruit

Bill Dislikes:

Green Vegetables

Being Late

Girlfriend's dog

Favourite Nappy: The Captain America one by Fluffity Fluff

Emma's Dad/Steve - Website Designer

Steve was a major pillar in creating Funky Monkey Pants. He taught himself HTML and created the Funky Monkey Pants website we all use today.

Steve wishes to remain anonymous at this time.

Elowen - Nappy Tester/Office Artwork Provider

Elowen at the beach.

Elowen is Emma's youngest daughter and when Funky Monkey Pants was just starting out, she was also nappy tester. As she grew up though she naturally moved on from this job to other responsibilities.
      These days Elowen provides artwork which we have been using to decorate the office. Emma has a collection of Elowen's earliest pieces in front of her desk and Bill has a very colourful snail on the wall next to his.
      Elowen also cares for our office mascots, Baby Bill and Oobicoo. She regularly updates their wardrobe to keep them looking fresh and fashionable.

Baby Bill and Oobicoo - Official Team Mascots

Baby Bill and Oobicoo relaxing on the sofa.

At one time there was just Oobicoo but not long after Adult Bill joined the group we received Baby Bill in the post and Oobi was alone no more.
      Their main role around the office is to sit down on the sofa and offer moral support throughout the long working day. They also act as models for whatever nappies or items of clothing Elowen decides they should be wearing.

Likes:

Cloth nappies!

Dislikes:

Disposable nappies

Funky Monkey Pants Office Tour

Hi everyone and welcome to your guided tour of the Funky Monkey Pants office.

Lets start with the important stuff. Here is our kitchen:

Complete with all facilities.

The kitchen is a big part of any workplace, it keeps us supplied with tea throughout the day (even though Bill doesn't drink tea) and even has a microwave that nobody ever uses.

If you come out of the kitchen and turn to your right you'll see the door into our office:

And a toilet on the left.

 Take a quick glance behind you and you'll see our signing in board, every time we come in we have to make sure we say we're in otherwise no one will know we're here!

Everyones in today!

Once inside you'll see our main working areas and our spacious and tidy (for now) office.

Bright, tidy and spacious, the perfect office.

To your left and slightly out of shot we have our shelving and display desk where we keep a number of our products out for people to see if any customers should happen to come down. Straight ahead we have Bill's desk and the packing desk and to the right we have our stock shelving and Emma's desk.

Lets go take a closer look around!

A colourful display.

Here is our display area. It takes a long time to set up a good display and when you sell as many products as we do it takes some serious time to get it looking good. We think we did a good job though. Even though we're an online retailer we like to keep a good display up in case anyone comes down to our office; which is totally okay for anyone who wants to come visit us by the way, we love visitors and you can buy stuff straight from us.

On the bottom right of the above picture there you can probably spy the arm of a sofa. We have the sofa for when people come into the office but it's also home to two permanent residence of our office...

It's Oobicoo and Baby Bill!

Oobi and Baby Bill (who as you can guess is named after the adult Bill) are our constant companions in the office and get a regular change of cloths courtesy of Elowen, today Baby Bill is sporting a Monopoly pattern nappy and some Inch Blue shoes. Very fashionable.

Next up we have Bill's desk:

Neat and tidy as always.

Bill likes to keep his desk nice and tidy and despite Emma's best efforts he does manage to do so a good amount of the time. Bill uses his desk the most but when he isn't around and Elowen is, she likes to take it over and cover it with stuff. Also you'll notice Bill's Lifebottle on the desk which he brings into work and puts in the same spot every day.

Opposite Bill we have the packing desk:

Orders ready to go!

Having a packing desk was part of an idea to increase efficiency and keep all our postage and packaging stuff in one simple place in the office and so far we think its work great!

Finally we have Emma's desk:

Complete with printer and drawers!

Emma's desk is where all the paper work happens which is for the best really as there is plenty of space to spread out. Emma's desk also comes complete with a bookshelf for filing and comfy swivel chair for those long paper work sessions.

That concludes the tour of our office, we hope you enjoyed it! If you fancy having a tour in person remember you can always come down to the office and we'll show you around!

Next time we'll be meeting the team so keep checking back!

Remember you can follow us on Blogger and on Twitter and Google+.

Real Nappy Week - A Real Busy Week

For those who don’t know, Real Nappy Week is a global event celebrating and helping to spread awareness of cloth nappies and their benefits to you and the environment.

It was a busy week and it had us occupied long before the week even began; preparing web pages and making decisions on what we were going to do throughout the week. It started when we looked at the Real Nappy Week page and looked through the theme for this year. This time around Go Real had chosen to do a week filled with seven different themes and we immediately knew that we wanted to prepare a different set of products to be on offer to represent each theme each day.

We spent a while deciding what products should be on offer each day and at first we were full of ideas but as we worked through the themes it became harder and harder to decide what we could offer. Somehow though we managed and were quite pleased with what we had and if how busy we were is an indication, so did you.

Now we've been spending this week playing catch up with all sorts of things that we got a little behind with while we were busy packing and sending orders, updating pages and correcting mistakes, changing prices and making last minute alterations to offers. We had so many orders in the last few days of Real Nappy Week that it took a couple of days into the week before we had caught up.

We're really grateful for all the support and to everyone who purchased from us last week and we hope that those lucky seven who received an Ecovessel scout cup are enjoying them.

Stay tuned for our next post coming soon!

Funky Monkey Pants Team

Harrogate Nursery Fair

Funky Monkey Pants at the Harrogate Nursery Fair

The Harrogate Nursery Fair is a once a year Nursery Trade show and host of the Baby and Nursery Trade Awards, BANTA.
This year the fair was from the 24th to the 26th of March so we left the office for the weekend and headed off on the 400 mile trip to the fair.

Our trip to the Harrogate Nursery Fair began at Truro Railway station, here's Elowen waiting patiently for the train to arrive:

The train journey was a long 7 hours; made longer by weather delays of course meaning that we didn't get to Harrogate until after 4 in the afternoon.

We don't get a lot of snow in Cornwall, just a lot of rain so while the rest of the country was hating the snow, we were somewhat excited. At the same time we were also very cold so the only snaps of snow we took were from the inside of our hotel room.

We didn't waste time getting to our hotel, we needed to warm up and it was definitely cosy. Here's a quick tour of where we stayed:

Bright and early the next morning we headed off to the Nursery Fair ready to explore and investigate all the products on show and talk to companies about upcoming products they had.

It wasn't very busy but that was probably because it was a Sunday. Even though there wasn't a huge busy crowd I still managed to get caught in all the things to see and forgot to make much use of my camera, silly me!

Who we saw:

-Hippychick
-TotsBots
-Close Parent
-Bambino Mio
-Bibs and Stuff, distributor of Skip Hop
-Merry Go Round
-Ergo
-The Little Green Sheep
-Prince Lionheart
-OiOi
-Splash About
-Beco

And many more. Heres Elowen enjoying the company of some of the TotsBots crew:

After a long day we went to get some food and then headed back to the hotel where Elowen, tired from all the shopping crashed out fast asleep and I was soon to follow.

We headed home on Monday and while our time away was fun we welcomed back the sight of Cornwall and its slightly warmer, yet slightly wetter climate.