Simply VIP Blogs - Hot Issues

Penny Golightly talks Savvy Shopping to our Simple VIPs

2010-09-08T00:00:00.0000000+00:00

Recession, the credit crunch, and changes in many people’s personal circumstances have all spurred an increase in consumers searching for cheaper beauty products. In the past, many women stayed loyal to certain skincare brands, but the current state of British finances now has many devotees discovering the benefits of moving to lower priced skincare brands, brands such as Simple.

As a keen bargain hunter, I started using Simple skincare a few years ago.
I found their Refreshing Facial Wash Gel had better results on my sensitive skin than many products that cost five or even eight times the price, and have never looked back. If you’re looking for an even better deal, I’ve noticed that Simple regularly promote their offers from this page: Promotions, and on Twitter and facebook. Definitely worth a visit.

If you’re a visitor to my site, you will know that we regularly review the latest offers in the UK. That includes sales, voucher codes, and the best competitions and freebies, plus products that really work without costing the earth. Simple contacted me via Twitter to let me know about how much they liked my blog post, ‘The REAL sale rules’, and asked me to share some of my favourite Savvy Shopping Tips with you lovely Simple VIPs.

Enjoy...and please feel free to pop by my Twitter page (@PennyGolightly) and site to keep up to date with all the latest bargain gossip.

* Think before you shop

I know only too well how easy it is to blow all your spare cash for the month. We’ve all done it, haven’t we? Now I think ahead a bit more before spending, and work out how much budget I have, and what my priorities are.
Sometimes it’s nice to have a little treat, but most of the time it’s better look for value for money.

When I’m buying beauty products and toiletries, I like to find out what real people think about them. A glossy magazine or this week’s celebrity advertisement can be fun, but it isn’t the first place I’d look for the facts. Review sites like DooYoo and MakeupAlley can be really useful when you’re thinking about buying something new.

Sign up with your favourite brands for free samples to try before you buy, or use the testers in department stores and high street chemists. Another thing I like to do is read the ingredients lists – it’s quite an eye opener when you realise how similar many products are once you take away the branding and packaging. Why pay £17 when a £3 product does exactly the same thing? I’ve finally learned that expensive doesn’t always mean better quality.

* Shop around

It’s well worth having a quick look around before making any purchases as you might save yourself a small fortune. You can compare prices on the high street, and it’s easy enough to have a quick look online as well. For everyday beauty products, I like to have a quick scan of Superdrug, Boots, and the big supermarkets (via MySupermarket). Many of them regularly have special offers including my favourite, ‘buy one, get one free’.

If you see something on offer that you like and use regularly, stock up.
It might not be available at that great price next time you’re in that shop. Store your goodies unopened in a cool, dry place and they should keep in perfect condition for many months.

For makeup and perfume bargains, there are plenty of online discount shops. I like Fragrance Direct, Direct Cosmetics and CheapSmells.com. Price comparison websites can sometimes help you find a good deal too, including BuyCentral and UK Shop.com.

If you’re shopping online, look out for discount vouchers and codes every time you shop. Some will get you money off your purchase, others can get you free gifts or free postage and packaging. I’ve found HotUKDeals very useful, and I also like VoucherCodesUK.

– Did you find any of these tips useful? If you’re a savvy shopper yourself, do you have any favourite sites that you’d like to recommend?
Please let us know!

Simple VIP of the month from August

2010-09-03T00:00:00.0000000+00:00

Guess what one of our Simple VIPs is a beauty blogger !! A really popular one too with a whopping 320 followers. ??She received all her lovely presents and let us know via twitter that she had blogged about it here and here.

She is reviewing the Simple products too, here are two of the most recent ones for your review:-
Review 1
Review 2

Thanks a lot Louise, we are really pleased you enjoyed receiving your goodies and really appreciate the reviews too.

The ‘blogs we love’ and ‘search for a blogger judge’ for Beauty Boot Camp

2010-08-16T00:00:00.0000000+00:00

‘blogs we love’

We are really loving www.bloglovin.com at the moment! It is a great place to keep track of the blogs we read. Signing up is easy and you just search for ‘blogs you follow’, or ‘add blogs’. Then the site notifies you every time one of your favourite bloggers has written something new. If you have a blog you can also claim it by adding code and displaying phrase Follow my blog with bloglovin. By claiming your blog you also get stats on which posts people particularly liked. It is all very positive.

We have recently updated our Celebrity page which lists beauty bloggers & writers and our connection pages at both ‘Simple VIP Blog’ and the ‘Teen Simple Blog’. The connections pages let you know where we like to network online: Simple VIP Connections

‘search for a blogger judge’

We love writing and reading blogs and we have been finding some great guest bloggers for you, visit the post on Twitter List again for a re-cap.

We are searching for a couple of special bloggers, to help us with the ‘Simple Star’ judging process, for both ‘Teen Simple Star’ and the ‘Simple Star’.

Simple already has a selection of journalists scheduled to attend our "Beauty Boot Camp", to cover the ‘Simple Star’ audition process. Now we would like to invite two bloggers to come along to write up their take on the day.

We anticipate the bloggers will play a large part in helping us to choose the ‘Simple Star’ and one to choose the ‘Teen Simple Blogger’.

How it would roll is:

The ‘Teen Video’ blogger judge would be invited to join us, in London, on 18th Sept (10am till 5pm)

The ‘Simple Star’ blogger judge would be invited to join us, in London, on 1st October (10am till 5pm)

The blogger would essentially watch the process of the day and there will be a 1hr session at the end where the finalists would present their pre-written blogs to our "Beauty Boot Camp" Blogger Judge and do a Q&A with the blogger. Ideally the blogger would be London based so they wouldn't have far to travel. We will provide lunch & refreshments for the judges on the day and of course shower the winning bloggers in Simple gifts; suited to their skin of course.

As we are building the Simple evolution together, this is a great opportunity for you to nominate a particular blogger that you think - "oh wow, XY blogger would be ideal for the Simple Beauty Boot Camp".

Let us know at this post or via our twitter account. In the meantime, we will check back on this post and will also invite bloggers that we already know, to see if they want to apply.

We will announce the two blogger winners who get to join us at Beauty Boot Camp here.

Thanks in advance for your help

Sarah ;)
Simple

Simple says “Social Networking is Fun”

2009-06-10T00:00:00.0000000+00:00

As many of your know we joined the world of Twitter at the start of 09 and since then we have been thoroughly enjoying our conversations with Simple fans, beauty fans , fashion addicts and UK magazines.

We've also had some lovely comments on our Simplecouk Twitter account from people sending in notes of thanks about our products, congratulating us on our awards, and also for our new online ventures. The whole Twitter experience has been a really rewarding one for our brand wellbeing.

Another great thing about Twitter is that we have found some genuinely lovely and beauty-passionate UK bloggers on there. We can get quick updates from their blog posts and in return they get updated on all Simple news. We regularly mention (RT) our favourites on Twitter and you can always check out who we follow to find some lovely Twitters relating to Beauty, Fashion, Charity and New Media. Several of the bloggers have reviewed our products and as a thanks we mention them on our news page, keeping our super fans and stakeholders very happy.

We didn’t want to be shouting about our products all the time within the social networking arena, so when we can join in with the conversation, we do.

Also as a little reward to our beauty bloggers we have started dedicating special tracks to them from our Blip.fm Simple account. Blip.fm has enabled Simple to become a DJ! We have been creating a playlist of beautiful and happy tracks and have encouraged some of our Twitter friends to Blip us a track. Currently we have lots of great tracks for you to enjoy here: Visit SimpleVIP DJ Playlist.

The Beauty Blog Network is another portal in which we can chat to our fans. We are mainly using the Beauty Blog network to help us find UK bloggers, and then to talk about new videos and new tools on our website and whatever else we think beauty fans may like.

Where else ??

We have our YouTube channel set up to find out what people think about our TV adverts and online videos. We are also finding some interesting UK beauty product reviewers on there too (check out our YouTube subscriptions).

AND we have recently set up a Facebook Fan page. The reason for this is that we know the majority of our Simple VIPs are already on there (after a survey we did at the early start of the year).

We will be sending out product updates and innovations from our Facebook account and occasionally sending out secret promotional codes to our Facebook Fans from time to time.

So if you love Simple Skincare and want your Facebook friends to know you are a Simple VIP fan – come and be one of the first to join us.

We know that a few of you may be sceptical about social networks and worried about joining - mainly due to data protection issues cited in the press. For those concerned or simply not interesting in other social networks Simple VIP Blog will always be here and with your help we aim for it to just get bigger and better. We love our VIP of the month section and the fact that so many of you keep coming back. Special thanks to all of you loyal followers, we really do appreciate your contribution in helping shape the future of Simple.

If you would like to familiarise yourself again with the benefits of joining Simple VIP click here: Benefits of Simple VIP Club

With the help of our favourite Teen Portal site Stardoll we also launched Teen Simple VIP in May 09. We regularly email our Teen members with tips and advice on a range of skincare, beauty and fashion matters.

To help us determine our teen path we launched a campaign to find a Junior Board of Skincare Advisors in June 09 to help us understand more about what Teens want. It is all very exciting stuff and we'll be talking about it at www.simple.co.uk/teen soon.

Also our Simple VIP club on Stardoll reported that in June we had more members than Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers which is a great achievement.

For a summary of all the above and quick links to Simple online, visit our Connections Page which is accessible on the right hand side of the blog or by visiting this link: Simple's Connections

You will also find a list of some of our favourite beauty, fashion and lifestyle websites. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do. If you do have any further thoughts on where we should be online, perhaps we are missing a vital UK beauty network, or UK beauty blog? Do let us know on this post.

Many thanks,

Speak to you all online soon

The Simple Team

Simple Male Skincare 2009

2009-06-05T00:00:00.0000000+00:00

Recently we have turned a little geeky and have been having a bit of fun using Google’s timeline facility. This has been around since 2007 however the link to get the timeline results is now a lot more clear. Explanation on how to find it follows:

Go to Google and type in a keyword – we chose “male skincare” – click the “show option” (top left) then click (in left hand navigation bar) Timeline.

A click then brings an amazing transformation of selected events related to your search, all with a date now attached are suddenly presented to you in a timeline format.

The search for Male Skincare returns around 100 events for the timeline dating back to a story in 1964 that was published online.

Action the search yourself (using above instructions) or click here for the male skincare timeline we produced;

We anticipate that the results have to have a year in the timeline, as that is how Google are finding the results. Also if you had a product called 2012 or wrote about 2012 then you could potentially appear too.

Interesting !

Lets run a test with this blog post to see if we can bring Male Skincare into the 2009 results (hence the title of this blog post). Will check in couple of weeks and see if we cracked it.

Now time for some less geeky news relating to male skin care: if you haven’t seen it already on our site, we have launched our own range of Simple for Men skincare products, which is ideal timing for Fathers Day on Sunday 21st June.

The Simple for Men Hydrate and Soothe pack contains a four stage no nonsense skincare regime.

Little tip - if you are thinking of ordering make sure you do by the 12th of June to ensure it is delivered on time.

Find the Simple for Men Hydrate and Soothe pack here.

Do you like the timeline feature on Google and if so what did you search for?

All the best,

Simple team

Little bit of blog organisation

2009-06-05T00:00:00.0000000+00:00

One of our Simple VIP fans has come up with a great suggestion, the idea is to move all our blog posts from the 'Teen Simple' team into their own Talk Topic. Talk Topics are featured in a little box top right corner of our Simple VIP blog.

Letting you all know here in 'Hot issues' that with this organisation some blog posts have moved just in case you have trouble finding them.

Also whilst blogging, thought to let you know that we have a very exciting page going live next week, you will have to visit back to find out what it is.

Thanks again to all our Fans for their support

Best wishes

Simple Team

Simplecouk are on Twitter – come follow us

2009-03-12T00:00:00.0000000+00:00

Guess what … along with recently setting up our Simplecouk YouTube channel at:

http://www.youtube.com/user/simplecouk

This week we have joined in with the conversation at Twitter (www.twitter.com/simplecouk), we have found all of our favourite UK (some USA) magazines to follow, fashion twitterers, UK retail shops you like and some of our favourite UK beauty blogs including: Beauty Pages, Beauty Addict UK, Beauty Guerrilla, The Style PA and Cult beauty blog.

Come and follow our twitter updates here for latest promotions and general chat.

We were also pleasantly surprised that a few of these lovely beauty bloggers had reviewed our products too.

There are lots of USA American beauty bloggers on Twitter, not as many UK beauty bloggers than we first anticipated, hoping to find more on there soon, so we can be even more clear on what is important to you.

If you have contacted us about your UK beauty blog, please note we are reviewing and will be in touch soon, we have lots of social networking plans for the future, so will be in contact to let you know how you could join in with that. If you haven’t let us know about your beauty blog or channel yet, feel free to send these in via Twitter or by simply replying to this blog post.

Keeping on top of everything beautiful, we are also following news on celebrity gossip, what Gok_Wan is up to, receiving updates from our favourite teen site Stardoll, making friends with UK mums and following fashion updates from some of the UK’s top newspaper fashion editors.

It is all very exciting stuff….

As you all know we believe in Goodness and we hope that twittering will make us even gooder (if that’s a word !!). We will be connecting with our fans on twitter, promoting the VIP club and promotions and letting you know who we admire (our follow list) and keeping on top of everything beautiful.

Hope to see you on Twitter soon or YouTube - wherever you feel most comfortable really.

All the best

Sarah the Simple Twitter or Tweeter

Get a Simple VIP badge

2009-01-22T00:00:00.0000000+00:00

Be a proud member of the Simple VIP club and pin a “I heart Simply VIP” badge or “I am a Simple VIP” badge onto your Blog, Myspace page or website.

Reward yourself and share the Simple VIP club love. The badges are available in three sizes and colours and should you wish to promote your membership we have also designed a “I am a Simple VIP” badge. Read more >

We have created our own YouTube Channel

2009-01-07T00:00:00.0000000+00:00

As many of you will know we’ve had our own video clips & podcasts from Caroline Frazer, Celebrity make up artist and our website resident Skincare expert for a while now on our Simple solutions live page http://www.simple.co.uk/Skincare-Solutions/

We are pleased to inform you that you can now watch all the videos from Simple on YouTube. Plus if you are active on Youtube and have an account, then you may wish to click the subscribe button on channel http://uk.youtube.com/simplecouk or share our videos with your friends, post them on your beauty blog or simply keep up to date on the latest news on looking after your skin.

We hope you will make use of it.

The aim of our Youtube channel is to allow you to connect and engage with Simple in more than one place. We hope you will send in your comments and reviews of the videos we post, also you maybe interested in watching our previous and new TV commercials from Simple. Do let us know what you think of our commercials ie: Do they relate to you? Do you like them?

We are avoiding the big launch of this channel for now and just letting you our site visitor and blog reader know about it. You can look forward to more interesting beauty related “How To's” on our Skincare Solutions page http://www.simple.co.uk/Skincare-Solutions and You Tube channel in the New Year. Gain access to the channel here or alternatively see the link on the Skincare solutions page http://www.simple.co.uk/Skincare-Solutions/

If there is a particular “How to” from our skincare expert that you would like to see/hear then let us know or sign up here to take part in our Live Simple Q&A session http://www.simple.co.uk/Skincare-Solutions/Register.aspx

Thanks for listening and we hope to see you watching our videos soon.

Summer Holidays!

2008-08-11T00:00:00.0000000+00:00

How smug do I feel?!!! My friend and I decided to take our children away for 2-weeks in the sun - we arrived at the airport with all our luggage - remembering not to forget in-date passports and the correct e-vouchers for our flight and of course having the correct weight suitcases for fear of having to repack and remove certain importants elements of clothing at check-in in front of all other passengers........ We had both forgotten the new ruling regarding liquids in hand-luggage. Now, I (Mrs Smug!) didn't need to have any liquids in my hand-luggage because I had my Simple Wipes (the answer to all my skincare needs!) whereas Amanda had some unacceptable liquid items in her handluggage which needed to be thrown away before we could even clear security! She was absolutely furious - not a great start to our holiday...... Needless to say she says that in future she will use Simple wipes as they are not only easy to use - but can be taken onto an aeroplane without causing a massive security scare!

When we arrived - it was so hot - unlike the UK - and we spent most of our time in and out of the pool and the last thing my children wanted to do was to stand still whilst I rubbed in suncream to every single piece of exposed body - I was so pleased that I had taken the SPF30 Kids Sun Cream in a spray bottle (I bought it in Boots) - it was soooo easy to apply and quick too!

As you can imagine, with 3 children I did not get a lot of time to simply read my book and lie in the sun (although we are all told not to nowadays because of the health scares asssociated with being in the sun) - so I am not "sun-tanned" - but I have come back with a beautiful healthy tan - as my 9 year old son William said - "Mummy, you don't have a sun tan - you have a moon tan"! I used Simple Self-Tan Lotion every night and woke up every morning with a beautiful healthy glow - hence his description of a moon-tan. I would thoroughly recommend it - none of the health issues and yet all of the glowing comments - "Wow, you look healthy", "You must have had a great time - you really have caught the sun"...... Little do they all know!

WOW!

2008-07-17T12:14:05.9530000+00:00

Simple, I just love your new website. It is so clean and fresh looking. There are so many new parts I don't know where to begin! I completed a Skin Health Check and was so excited when I received my report..... It is so comprehensive and full of so many pieces of advice and information - I didn't realise that I knew so little! Note to self: I really must drink more water and eat more berries. I also love the fact that you have recommended a selection of products which are right for my skin and I could buy them straight away - without having to even leave my house. I hope they arrive soon - because according to my report I need to start using them straight away - particularly Radiance Wipes and the Eye Cream. I also love the new VIP site - I know that you asked us our opinion about the site we preferred - I didn't realise just how much better it would be..... I want to be VIP of the month so I am going to recommend all my friends.....
Well done Simple - great products and a great website..........

Wipe your way to radiance!

2008-05-29T00:00:00.0000000+00:00

As we told you in last month’s newsletter, we have sent the exclusive and yet to be launched Simple Radiance Wipes to all of our UK based friends of Simple. We hope you like them.

The product you have been sent is so new that no one from the press or public will have had a chance to see it, try it, or comment on it before you. However, we would love to know your thoughts, so please, please, please tell us what you think about the latest addition to Simple’s range. All you have to do is post a comment to this blog.