Just a quick note to say that we have launched www.glimmeringlights.com

Glimmering Lights is a joint business endeavour to bring the beauty of hand made high quality lighting from around the world to the UK market.

Background Story

Travelling around the grand bazaar in Istanbul or around the very impressive Marrakech Souk you will come across very high quality and hand made products. These products are still made in the old traditional ways.

We were very impressed with the lighting from these markets. Multiple colours and designs all in different sizes.

After purchasing some of these lights we returned back to the UK and everyone who saw them loved them and wanted to know where they could purchase them. With all this attention we both decided that it might be a good idea to test a niche market and start selling these lights online. Little did we know the massive amount of work entailed in importing these lights and selling them in the UK. Making the e-commerce website was the easy part!

Products

We decided to focus on products from Turkey and Morocco to begin with. The lights from Turkey are from the old Ottoman times, you will find variations of them in most of the old Ottoman buildings around Istanbul. But these are obviously to a massive scale.

The lights from Morocco are completely different. For example the Turkish pendents are made from glass while the Moroccan ones are made from a very light metal. We really like the Henna lamps from Morocco. They are free standing lamps that have a metal base with canvas surrounding it with hand painted henna designs. This means that one lamp is never the exact same design.

Technology

Of course we used Ruby on Rails to build this site based on the excellent open source e-commerce application; Spree

Although I did have a few interesting bugs upgrading from versions I would highly recommend using it.

For payment we are currently using Paypal express. We are in the process of getting a merchant account so we can process the payments directly. Unfortunately we can only ship to the UK due to the fragile nature of the lights.

I know this is not on topic of this blog, but I thought I would share some of the background story of Glimmering Lights.

I would love to hear your comments on our product range.

Stay tuned for lights from Indonesia.