WINNER OF TREE ON FIRE DRAWING

To everyone who celebrates US Independence Day, best wishes for a good holiday, and do whatever you can to make sure your pets aren't frightened by the fireworks.

The winner of last week's drawing is:

TRINITI

Please provide your complete shipping address by e-mail (olympicorchids at gmail dot com) or PM on our Facebook page.

If your prize is not claimed by Tuesday, July 11, it will go back into the jackpot.

[gratuitous cat photo is mine]

THE MONDAY GIVEAWAY AND A FRAGRANT MINI-ORCHID

It’s Monday again, and time for another giveaway. But first, I want to brag about a wonderful little orchid that’s blooming in my greenhouse this week, pumping out loads of fragrance. It’s Cadetia taylori, an Australian species that grows in rainforest and mangrove swamps and looks like a white insect with antennae. It blooms off and on all year long, but seems to like summer. The fragrance is a sweet vanilla-mixed floral scent with anise overtones. It’s similar to some of the Dendrobium moniliforme flowers that have that anise smell. Australia has more than its share of cool orchid species!

For this week’s giveaway, there is no jackpot because everything from the Tigerlily tote bags drawing is on its way to the winners. What I'm offering this week is another 100 g batch of miscellaneous perfume samples along with whatever other goodies I randomly find in my studio. To enter the drawing, leave a comment about what features you really like on a perfume e-store.

Last week’s winners will be announced tomorrow.

[Orchid photo is mine]

NEW OLYMPIC ORCHIDS PERFUME WEBSITE COMING

July marks the seventh anniversary of Olympic Orchids perfumes, and it is only fitting that there should be an update of the online store that has been essentially the same since 2010. A couple of years ago I did make a halfhearted attempt to design a new website on Shopify, but it never really took off, partly because I never put all of my products on it, and partly because Shopify is not the best platform to use. No need to go into its shortcomings. Website design and implementation has been taking most of my time for the past week. Such is the life of a perfumer who doesn't outsource anything. 

It turned out that I was able stay with my primary web hosting company and design an entirely new website using a Wordpress front end and a Woocommerce infrastructure. The URL will stay the same. It’s a nice combination, and extremely easy to use. I have re-photographed almost all of my products, put them up on the e-store with pull-down menus for sizes, shipping options, and other attributes, added a few new products, and added some cool new features. For example, there’s now a system for customers to receive points for their purchases and redeem them for discounts or free products. If this website works well, I will discontinue the Shopify site and consolidate everything on one e-store. This will be a lot less confusing for everyone. For continuity, I've tried to keep some of the original graphics, but everything is cleaned up. 

The hardest part has been completed, but I know there will be lots of ongoing tweaks and corrections as people use the website. I'll also continue to add new features and graphics. Right now it's pretty bare-bones. 

I am tentatively planning on the new website going live this Wednesday, July 5, and will need some people to test it. I added an almost-free test product for the first 10 people who are willing to go through the entire cart, checkout, and ordering procedure on an untested website, so look for this to appear next week. There will also be a seventh anniversary discount via a “coupon” that can be added at checkout. I’ll give people the coupon code in my July newsletter, on this blog, and on Facebook.

I hope people will like the remodel. 

[All photos are mine]

SKUNK WORKS DRAWING WINNERS

I meant to publish the results of the drawing yesterday, but was distracted by the morning's ferry trip to pick up baby orchid flasks, followed by the power company's subcontractors coming to mutilate our trees, and then working on the new, improved Olympic Orchids Perfume Boutique website, which is coming along nicely, but slowly because of all the products that have to be entered in multiple variations.

The winners of last weeks drawing for a Tigerlily tote bag filled with samples and other goodies are:

TARENA

RAJESH BALAKRISHNAN

If you are a winner, please contact me with your complete shipping address at olympicorchids at gmail dot com or send a PM on our Facebook page. You must claim your prize by Wednesday, July 5 or it will be added back into the jackpot.

[Photo is mine, taken from our local beach at the Edmonds ferry terminal three nights ago]

THE MONDAY GIVEAWAY: A TREE ON FIRE AND ALL SORTS OF SAMPLES

Yesterday we had a frightening incident near our property. A cypress tree that had grown too tall hit an uninsulated wire on a power line and caught on fire. There was a loud noise as the tree ignited, and within seconds flames were leaping way up in the air from the whole top of the tree. I should have taken a photo, but was too busy calling the power company and 911. However, the flames coming off the trees in this photo of a forest fire in Yellowstone Park are a pretty good approximation of how it looked. Fortunately the dry season is just at its beginning, so the tree must have still had enough water content to extinguish the fire by itself, so we could cancel the call to the fire department. The local electric company came and turned off the power to those wires, putting everybody on some other circuit. They will send a crew sometime soon to do whatever they need to do to keep the trees from burning again. This must be a fairly common occurrence because when I phoned them, the first item on their robo-message was “if you have a tree burning, press 1”. Why don’t they just insulate the wires?

That was the weekend’s big excitement. The Monday giveaway is much more mundane. In the course of doing business with various supply companies I acquire a lot of offbeat samples, often unsolicited. I have a big collection of everything from essential oil mixes to synthetic fragrance oils to Indian perfumes and attars. This week’s prize will be a big selection of these commercial samples.

To enter the drawing, just leave a comment saying whether you like all-natural essential oil mixes, fragrance oils, designer duplications, or Indian/Arabian perfume oils and attars, or whether you have ever has a tree catch fire due to hitting a power line. 

Winners of last weeks giveaway will be announced tomorrow. 

[Forest fire photo from Wikimedia; power lines painting by Henri Rousseau, 1898]