La Perouge de Toile

The tale of a boutique clothing and kitchenware vendor. Now sold off to New Zealand.

Business Sold, October 2020

Late in 2020 checking the website showed a closure page. The business has been sold to a New Zealander and will reopen with a new website, but oddly the domain name laperougedetoile.com, was not required. Maybe when they relaunch a newsletter or flyer will be sent out to their mailing list with a link to the new website. There is no obvious way for new customers to join.

But happily, this was only temporary. Before letting the domain expire I prudently contacted the new owner who still wanted the domain. La Perouge de Toile is now back and looking better than ever! My first overseas client!

Thoughts on La Perouge De Toile

Having never actually spoken to or met with the owner over the years, working on La Perouge De Toile was a different experience. The only contact I had with anyone from the business was when I gave lessons to the daughter in law in using WordPress.

I always had trouble remembering the La Perouge De Toile name, it's supposed to mean in French "beautiful towels". It's a good example of what not to name your business. Since most of the customers were English speaking it would have been better to have a more meaningful name in English, with maybe one French word to represent where the inspiration came from.

Many, if not all, of the models are the owner's grandchildren. I suspect that as they got older they no longer could model children's clothing; and maybe they got fed up with being dressed and photographed by grandma.

Hopefully the new owners will keep up the quality of the products that La Perouge De Toile once sold.

Moving to Wix, 2017

Around 2017 the site was moved to the Wix platform. Maybe the daughter couldn't handle WordPress and the drag and drop environment was more suitable. The website looks incomplete in places; the blog doesn't load, the Contact Us page has inconsistent colours, and the main menu isn't present on some pages.

It still seems to be active with new products occasionally making their debut. As the children in the family grow up more child models will be needed, but maybe then the desire to run a children's clothing E Commerce website will go too.

eCommerce with WooCommerce, March 2015

In March 2015 a new website was completed using WooCommerce. This has the advantage where you can copy the product page template to the themes folder, and change it how you like. And WooCommerce updates won't overwrite your changes.

Tea Towels

Part of the range I really liked were the tea towels, each a high quality towel with a lovely food or home themed image printed on it. They make excellent gifts and instead of getting money for some of the website work I took it in towels.

Bar Mats

Introducing the bars mats was the initial driver for redoing the website. These are rubber backed and probably use the same technique (and factory) to print alcohol related images onto them.

Website First Version, 2015

A new business was being launched that sells kitchen towels with beautiful inspiring images.

The website is at www.laperougedetoile.com.