Expocentric joins as a parter

I had a wonderful meeting on Friday with Steve Laker from Expocentric in Covent Garden.

One of the things the big multi-national, chain stores have over small, independent shops is buying power. It’s this huge buying power that allows them to negotiate special rates with suppliers, undercutting the little guys that simply can’t compete.

(Often, they screw their suppliers in the process. Steve recommended Joanna Blythman’s book Shopped, where evidence of the shoddy treatment suppliers receive at the hands of the nation’s supermarkets is well documented.)

As a community of independent shops, we are in a unique position – we’re independent with the buying power of our community. It’s with this in mind that we’re in the process of securing preferential rates from a range of suppliers for all of our Unchained shops.

And I’m delighted to welcome Steve and Expocentric aboard – right at the top of that list.

Expocentric will soon be listed on our ‘partners’ page and on your personal homepage if you’re already an independent shop member.

If you’d like to get involved or be added as a partner, offering our members a preferential rate, we’d love to hear from you.

It’s a beautiful thing.

Our most popular day yet

A big (and very overdue) message of thanks to the lovely Asi Sharabi for saying kind things and adding a link to our site on his blog, giving the site its most popular day yet.

Asi, you're a dude.

An office and everything

Yesterday was a big day for us. We signed a contract for office space just off Hoxton Square.

It's all starting to feel quite real and I'm absolutely loving it.

The offices are lovely. It's a shared workspace of small businesses. And unlike a lot of the other spaces we had a look at before, you don't have to climb stairs into someone's attic to get to it and there's no rotting carpet either - all good things. This space is clean, white and bright.

It's the brainchild of Christopher Hill who was having the same issues when he was looking for office space for his company Linedota Architects.

We move in at the end of the month. So if you come across an amazing Unchained store that you just have to share with us immediately, face-to-face you can find us at 115b Drysdale Rd.

What a start to the new year!

It seems a bit late to be wishing everyone a happy new year. But nonetheless, Happy New Year to you!

Normally over the festive period - like everyone else - we'd be looking forward to another year pretty much like the last one. But not this time! Already 2008 has brought big changes to all of our lives here at Unchained. And we know that there's plenty more changes of seismic proportions to come.

At the start of February we'll hopefully be moving into our new office in the East End. And we hope to launch the second Unchained city before the spring flowers start breaking the dirt. In the meantime, Lea is spending every waking minute emailing, phoning and meeting people face-to-face. And the feedback from everyone is so positive it's just making us all the more excited.

Here's to 2008! Cheers!

God bless Unchained and all who sail in her

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am proud to present Unchained - your destination for the very best independent shops in London.

We have now launched our beta version of the site for people to play with, look for things that bug them and give their feedback. And we'd love you to be amongst the first people to use it.

There are still a few little bugs that we're trying to fix. And there's only about 90 shops on the site at the moment - there'll be loads more added at the start of January. But the main workings are all there. Here's what to look out for:

• The shopping trip - You can save any of the shops to a temporary list by clicking on the 'shopping trip' button. This creates a floating panel that shows you all the shops you've selected. You can view them on a map and print them out to take with you on your retail extravaganza. The panel appears initially at the top of the page. It's an orange bar that you can expand and minimise and drag around the screen. You can even share your shopping trip with your friends so that they can join you on your adventure.

• My favourites - You'll also see a little yellow star that lets you add a shop to a more permanent favourites list. You can see this list by clicking on the 'my account' link at the top of the screen and then clicking on the 'go to my favourites' for your chosen city.

• Searching - There are a few ways to find what you're looking for. You can simply click on shop types in the left hand listing. Or - best of all - use the search box at the top left to find shops by name, products, type, area or character.

Please try it out and tell us what you think. And start shopping Unchained.

Another little sneaky peak

Here's another little look at some of the functionality of the soon-to-be-released Unchained site.

Each shop listing comes with a Google map showing exactly where they are. Just look at the cute little Unchained flag!

We're also giving you the ability to plan a shopping trip round a number of shops and plot them all on a map.

We're testing it all out at the moment and it's working beautifully. We just can't wait to release it into the wild. Which is something we will be doing very soon.

And we do mean VERY soon!

Follow the blog by phone

Seeing as a big part of Unchained will be the mobile site, we decided to make the blog mobile as well. So now you can follow us from wherever you are on your mobile phone.

If you're sufficiently teched up, you can visit the site by taking a picture of the QR code at the top of this post. If not, get your text thumb working and type the following address into your phone's browser:

http://winksite.com/davebirss/unchained