...shortly.....

Well, those sounded like famous last words:..I'll upload some pictures shortly...
It's actually been tremendously busy this year and as always, if we need to make the choice between getting orders out, seeing customers or generally keeping customers happy of putting a post on our blog, the blog had to suffer from neglect. Anyway, we're making some headway, so I've found some time to put another post on here. We've also found the time to do some product development on personalizing the car mats that we manufacture and it seems that customers like it. The only thing is that it's still a secret and as I'm sure that our competitors read these posts as well, I won't post a picture of it just yet.

20 Years of Autostyle Car Mat Manufacturing

It's been extremely busy in the last few months, but I'll try and be a bit more disciplined and write a few bits. In 2011, it is 20 years since Autostyle started manufacturing car mats in Old Sarum in the UK. Since then, the factory was moved to Hungerford, then to Buckingham and the last 3.5 years we've been based in a large industrial unit in Milton Keynes.
I'll upload some pictures shortly.

Why does anyone need car mats?

Back from the holidays, we're back at work manufacturing car mats here at Autostyle. I met a few people during my holidays and when it came to the 'and what do you do' question, I got on my soap box when they raised their eyebrows after hearing my 'we manufacture car mats' response: It's a product that everyone knows exist, but not a lot of people think about. The important function of a car mat is that it protects the interior from dirt and wear. Did you know that a car that was fitted with a set of car mats when new will be £200 - £300 more worth after 3 years? And that's because the interior is cleaner and less worn. Why would anyone not buy a set of mats? It shows that you've cared for your car. Obviously the Autostyle Premier Car Mats not only protect the interior but enhance it as well, with the various colours and the embroidered motifs. Anyway, when I looked around and saw that everyone had dozed off, I finished my Guinness and got back to my tent.

CELEBRITY CUSTOMERS: as I wrote in one of my earlier posts, we seem to be supplying our fair share of celebrities. I won't list any names and I won't list all of them, but two weeks ago, within one day we got an order for a set of mats for a bishop (a real one, we googled him) as well as a set for a famous porn star (we didn't need to google him, my colleague knew him ;-)).
Curiously, they both ordered near enough the same thing.

Lambswool rugs

As I've written on these pages before, we cater for the car enthusiasts. As we use a hard wearing automotive quality carpet to make our mats, they tend to last very long and most of our customers only come back when they have changed their car and want a new set of Autostyle mats. With a starting price of £60 for the set, including two embroidered motifs, it's a very good investment to keep the interior of your car nice and clean, whilst it adds a personal touch to your vehicle.

As well as our Premier mats, which are available in 9 colours at present, we now also offer tailored lambswool rugs in three colours, black, grey and sable/mocha. This last colour is specifically made with Jaguar / Daimler owners in mind, as it is a very good colour match for the sable and mocha interiors of those brands. One really nice set in sable / mocha in this material was for the Jaguar XJ6 in the picture above, owned by the MD of a Buckinghamshire based building company. He clearly loves his car and wanted something nice to finish off the interior. And he must have been going to a few Jaguar owners club meets, as we've had a fair amount of interest for Jaguar sets recently.

But... although limousine owners and wedding car chauffeurs like the finish of our lambswool, the rugs do find their way into other cars as well. In the last three weeks, we have made lambswool sets for a variety of cars, ranging from a Mercedes S-Class to a VW Beetle. It's a great feel of luxury to have one of these sets in the car. One of our customers told me recently that he likes to sit barefooted in the car (having a bit of quality time listening to the radio whilst the car is on the drive).

In the last month, we supplied hundreds of sets to various people, in the UK and abroad, but two orders stood out. One was for a nice set of rugs for one of Britains leading entrepreneurs, to brighten up the interior of his Maybach. The other one was for a bespoke set of mats to fit the Porsche Cayenne of a very well known British athlete (sorry, won't say no names, especially as he's a very good boxer).

We have been getting more pictures of customers' cars (and then specifically the interior) and I'm planning to put a few of these pictures in this blog, so you can see the end result of our hard work for yourself.

Autostyle - a bit of the history

Autostyle as a brand has been around for quite a long time. We started off selling mats at shows and from there on developed our business and our products to also supply manufacturers, importers, car dealers, specialist retailers etcetera.

One important part of our business is our Autostyle website. We were fairly quick in recognising that the internet could play a vital role in our business. We went online on the 10th of September 1997 (to put that in perspective, that was 5 days before Google came online) and have since been a very recognisable brand on the web.

When I told our designers that I wanted to write something about the web history of http://www.autostyle.co.uk/, one of them came up with the picture above. I thought it was quite funny.

Anyway, I'll try and write some more on the subject later.

Autostyle - and a bit more marketing...

And I found another 'golden oldie' concept that didn't make it to print.

Autostyle - More Marketing

Over the years, we've advertised our Autostyle brand in a great number of newspapers and magazines and we still do, but not to the extend that we used to.

A lot of our marketing is now focused on the internet, as it seems that most of our customer find http://www.autostyle.co.uk/ through Google and Yahoo and other search engines. Over the last twelve months, we did play with the idea of doing some advertising, referring to current affairs or "news of the day" news items and our marketing guys came up with some funny takes on politics. Even last week a suitable bit of news came up.

We didn't actually use these pictures in a campaign, but I think they're too good to just ignore, so I thought I would publish them here on our blog. Here's the first one!

P.S. If we get complaints from the Conservative Party, I'll let you know.