Joanne Musgrave

While some people may find it flattering, I’m getting sick and tired of backyard hacks running online shops that think they can come to my website and steal graphics from my site because they don’t have the skills to do it themselves.

It’s THEFT, plain and simple people. Don’t steal from other retailers. It’s wrong. It’s unethical. It’s pathetic. It’s tracable. It’s against the law. It will cost you money in fines.

If I see any more, I’m going to start naming you in public.

To those who steal from me and in particular, those who come back with smart arse remarks when I call them on it, may your businesses circle the drain and get washed away where they belong. You may sit at home and pack 10 orders a week, discount the crap out of product and do this for pocket money for craft supplies, but we actually run a full time business, have staff to pay, insurance, tax, warehouse rent, and we don’t take kindly to being stolen from.

That is all.

As the weather gets colder (I’m sure it’s snowing somewhere), it’s amazing how many people are stopping by the shop to buy travel mugs, thermos flasks  and insulated food jars at the moment. We’ve even just set up a standalone website to help people with their travel mug and insulated drink bottle choices – www.travelmugs.net.au

Also, be on the lookout, we’re about to stock the entire range of Lock & Lock food containers. The only other company that appear to be doing it are Kitchen ‘n Table. And no, I didn’t just link to a competitors website, I linked to the customer reviews for this online shop at MyShopping.com.au. They have a 1 star rating (out of 5) and I have lost count of the number of customers that have told me they ordered from them and their parcel never arrived, so they’ve had to cut their losses and order from me instead.

Online shops that do this make everyone look bad. I really wish they wouldn’t do it.

Wow, busy work weekend. I installed 6, yes SIX copies of Word Press this weekend with various custom templates from Woo Themes and Gorilla Themes. We have blogs for Cheap Dresses, Strapless Black Dress, Buy Clothes Online, Suicide Safety Network, Vegan Shopping Australia and Organic Skin Care. They’re not populated with content just yet, both me and my clients are still working on that part.

Plus, to top it all off, we’ve been adding stock to Shop Naturally, including the cutest Insulated Lunch Bag range I’ve ever seen from Skip Hop and I wrote a funny thermos flask recipe over at I can’t believe it’s not a recipe.

………….. and it’s only Saturday night!

Selling water bottles is quite the seasonal product and we unfortunately have seen a bit of a slow down in sales accordingly. What amazes me though is that we somehow have the #11 spot in Google for the phrase ‘drink bottles‘ and I have done absolutely no work on it whatsoever. We’re still sitting at #30 for ‘water bottles‘, that one’s going to be tough cooking to crack.

We’re adding the Herbon range of cleaning products to the store, and in a few days, a new exciting range of Organic Baby Products called Buds for Baby and a few other surprises in store that we’re just going to do a bit of product testing on first.

Having some fun with my joke website, I Can’t Believe It’s Not A Recipe too, which I have decided I will also put a few links and comments on REAL websites, cookbooks and recipes – not just easy ingredient combinations for the culinary challenged among us!

We’ve been doing a huge amount of product development for Shop Naturally, and for the past couple of weeks we’ve been working on our stainless steel lunch box range.

We have added the LunchBots, the ECOlunchbox and a whole range of insulated lunch bags from Built NY. Click on the links to check out how funky they are!

Day 4, and we’ve gone walking EVERY morning before work. I’m so glad I’m getting up early each morning and going for a walk before work, I feel so much better for it now.

Today I even took the dogs with me, and trust me, it was a fun experience when they’ve never learnt to heal on a lead! (thanks James). I have now gone and bought short dog leads from Pet Barn today and getting the dogs to heal should be a little easier tomorrow. Stay tuned.

After months of delaying this for something more important, thanks to the Easter bunny this weekend, I finally found the time to design, fill and launch my assault on the phrase ‘bpa free baby bottles‘ in Google – www.safebpafreebabybottles.com.au

It’s a fairly comprehensive guide to all the bpa free baby bottles we sell at Shop Naturally, with little hints and bits of information about which bottle is best suited for your needs. We’re giving away a Green to Grow Welcome Home set this month and next month we’ll be giving away the new Earthlust Birds & Bees insulated baby bottles.

We will be adding a couple of new brands over the next few weeks, and will soon have the most comprehensive selection on the market. For now, we have deliberately chosen not to stock the Avent bottles and the Tommee Tippee, because every chemist shop & supermarket we walked in to had them on the shelves already, tossed loosely amongst a large pile of toxic polycarbonate and cheap flimsy crap! Luckily they’re marked BPA Free or you’d never know what you were getting.

If you’re wondering why you should choose BPA Free Baby bottles, basically, BPA is an endocrine disruptor and it can screw with your childs hormonal development, especially if you’re putting plastic bottles in the microwave.

I’m seriously considering expanding our range of MiEssence products at Shop Naturally to include the bulk of the organic skin care and possibly the make-up too. Do people really buy make-up online? Considering I never wear make-up, this is not an area I have a huge amount of experience in. Guess it’s about time to crack out the Survey Monkey to ask the opinions of the people on our mailing list.  If you’re an online junkie like me and you do buy make-up or skin care online, I would love to hear your thoughts.

On another totally unrelated note, anyone want to get grubby this afternoon? I’m off to help run the CCTRI offroad duathlon.

I found it amusing this morning while doing a bit of research online – a few weeks ago, I was the only online retailer selling the ecococoon stainless steel cups with a free set of the go-betweens so they don’t get stuck together.  Now at least two other competitors have decided to give away the go-betweens for free as well. So if you’ve bought some ecococoon cups online and you got a free set, you can say thank you to me later

Word of advice for the competition, if I ever catch anyone taking any of my images off any of my websites, you will get one warning, and then you will be receiving a bill for the prior use of my artwork and another bill for future use should you not remove them. As a professional web designer / artwork developer / creative director / all round internet marketing guru (my day job), I take the theft of my work, regardless of how small or insignificant the image may be, very seriously. Myself and the staff working here at Shop Naturally put a huge amount of time and effort in to making our site out shine all others on the internet and stealing my work will NOT be tolerated.

Alas, another weekend working on the shop. I will be adding the new colour klean kanteen bottles to my BPA Free Water Bottles website, and working on the BPA Free Baby Bottles on the shop and also the Safe BPA Free Baby Bottles website now that we’re expanding our range of Baby Bottles.

I may even find some time to do a couple of loads of laundry and play with my Bonsai trees.

The new Klean Kanteen coloured range of stainless steel water bottles are super funky.  Looks like the staff are going to be busy working overtime this week with adding new stock to the shop.

I had a customer write to me today and say “We are so impressed with the water flow rate with the sports 2 cap that one for each of the family in a couple of different sizes would be great for different situations.” Then she proceeded to give me a wish list of the new coloured bottles for our next stock order.

See, I’m not the only person who thinks the Klean Kanteen Bottles have the best sports cap on the market. Getting feedback like this makes the long hours slaving away at the computer worth all the effort (and the sales help pay for my new glasses!)