Posts Tagged ‘sidelines’

Reflections on EXPO 2010

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

Trade shows always require an enormous effort in planning and setup just for a few days of meet ‘n’ greets with our existing customers and hopefully with a few new customers as well. Last week’s Closet & Home Organization Expo, held in Long Beach, California, was no exception. But we always thoroughly enjoy this annual event and the opportunity to see friends, colleagues and clients.

Having done this for so long now, setting up the actual booth with our many new products goes quickly. Here’s a shot of our finished exhibit:

Sidelines' EXPO Booth Display

Sidelines' EXPO Booth Display

This year we previewed some brand new products coming out later this year for the kitchen and pantry. These are pretty nifty pull-out racks that glide in and out silently on soft-close, ball-bearing mechanisms, so they feel light as air since there’s no effort needed to move them around. Here’s what our “kitchen products” wall display looked like:

Sidelines' Kitchen Products

Sidelines' Kitchen Products

On the left side you can see our new, tall Pull-Out Pantry Rack. And then our smaller and shorter Pull-Out Adjustable Cabinet Rack is shown in the middle at bottom, under the PressFix ironing board which is folded up, stored away.

We had lots of comments on these new items, most of which leaned towards the “this is so long overdue for the industry” type sentiments. We think so too! These will be available later in the year. (Watch this space for a future release date on these.) They are currently available for standard depth kitchen cabinetry (greater than 19” deep) in several widths and all with adjustable height ranges.

A couple of the other big previews we showed off at EXPO was on our “closet products” wall. We unveiled two new sliding mirror products for mounting on closet section side panels. Here’s the small one that’s designed as a three-panel model:

DSC09675

3-Way Mirror and Deluxe Double Rack

This one is only two feet tall, and the side mirrors hinge in over the main mirror for easy storage. You can also see our new Deluxe Double Rack mounted above the mirror in this photo. The DDR is actually a hardware plate added to our existing Deluxe Tie, Belt or Valet Rack units so that you can double the amount of rack storage (of your choice). You can use two tie racks, or belt racks, or one of each on either side of this new hardware plate.
We’ll have more on all these new products as they become available. There were several more items unveiled at the show. Keep checking back for more news from the organization front!

Re-Organizing Our Website, Launching New Features

Friday, November 13th, 2009

We’re kicking off the long, low rays of fall sunlight with a new design to our home page and some new additions to our website. Most importantly, we’ve added a second menu toolbar below our main one for faster navigation (a feature requested by many in our customer survey comments a couple of months ago). You can now jump directly to closet or kitchen products via the “Closet Essentials” and “Kitchen Essentials” buttons (along with others for Laundry and Hardwear). Further improvements to product pages’ navigation will come early next year. You’ll also find links to the Closet Essentials and Kitchen Essentials pages from the photos on the home page.

New features available on our home page are abundant: For easy reference, we’ve added the customer service phone number at the top of the site page, so you can always call us if you have a question while visiting any portion of our website without searching for the number.

Many of our clients asked in our survey for a quick link to our sale items’ page. We’ve filled your request with a single-click link titled “On Sale!” which will take you directly to the sale information page.

Finally, we’ve got a couple of nifty new features for your perusal: first, we added links to follow us on Twitter and Facebook.  There you’ll find we provide highlights of other organization and storage tips and news, as well as links to our own key products. Also added to our home page is a new, newsletter sign up link. And we’ve launched a blog to provide you more timely information about our products and home organization in general.

Let us know what you think. Have we filled some of your wish list items you mentioned in our survey? We’ll have more updates coming soon. Click on the comments section below to add your feedback and click on RSS feed to add our blog to your RSS feeds list. Experience the best interaction at Sidelines®!