News

"First up was The Who, the guys are even older than me but what a show. probably the last time they will tour so we just had to make the trip.
Our favourite venue is Newcastle City Hall, only an hour from Ripon and one of the best venues in the country"

It hasn`t escaped some of our more observant customers that the website has not been fully functioning for over a week now, this is because we have been working hard behind the scenes to load the site up with more goodies than ever. We have also invested in some super duper stock keeping software that means all our stock levels should now be accurate and live at all times (well thats the theory anyway ! ) No doubt there will be the odd glitch as there always is wherever computers are involved but fingers crossed all will be well. Once we have recovered from the effort we will be running some kind of promotion which will mean prizes ! Meanwhile we would like to thank you all for your patience during this essential work and wish you happy shopping :)

We should have been sending out a newsletter announcing the winner of the Evolution Airbrush, in fact we did but only a handful of people actually got it.

There seems to be a technical issue with the newsletter thingy and we have not been able to find a quick solution. The website itself is working fine, the news function is an add on and only that part is broken.

So, the winner of the fantastic Harder & Steenbeck Evolutiuon Solo is Colin Hyde in the West Midlands(ish).

Congratulations Colin, we're sure you'll make good use of it.

You'll all have worked out by now that we take risks, we like to push the model business back toward it's proper place. In this case it's the High street. Model shops have retreated to industrial estates and then the internet and often to low or zero stock spare room businesses - not the service you need.

Veteranus have reversed this process, we started as an internet only business, we opened a warehouse cum shop and now we have gone full circle.

On Saturday 30th July our new shop opens on High Skellgate in Ripon, just 50 metres off the Market Square. The outside won't look very exciting, it's a very old listed building and we can't change it much - inside you'll find the most up to date stock anywhere in the country.

We are introducing regular free prize draws for our internet customers and to celebrate our new shop the first draw has a spectacular prize - the amazing and beautiful Evolution 2 in 1 airbrush worth £130. All you have to do is open an account on the website, no purchase is necessary - make sure you enable marketing to get updates on this and future free draws.

Our existing shop has now closed, unfortunately there will be no customer service telephone until 29/07/16 - pathetic I know, we chose the wrong Telecom provider. Enquiries will still be dealt with by email and web site contact.

There may be some slight delays in delivery during this time, especially mid week, but no more than a day or two.

Meanwhile, a lot of work to do fitting out the new shop and moving stock - it's going to be a long weekend. The upside is that the new shop on High Skellgate is very near our house and Alex the Cat is delighted. We took him round for an inspection and it was clear that the yard was already part of his territory, happy cat.

Oh yes, products. We have some new and unusual brands coming very soon, Veteranus constantly strives to bring you the kits you can't get elsewhere. There's big news coming for Model Railway fans too, more of that in a week or two.

 

It's your fault, you keep buying stuff and making us busy. Nothing to do with me being so rubbish at keeping up with the blog pages.

There's so much going on here that I can barely remember what's "new", sometimes it's all a blur. We're still growing at such a rate that stock is in and out before it even gets on the shelves - often before it gets on the web site. One day we'll get the order levels right, could all get a bit boring though.

We are, however, giving ourselves a bit of a break. We'll be closed for a whole three days from May 21st - extravagant or what. Even better, for us, we had a ticket buying splurge and booked a couple of gigs we're really excited about, Last Shadow Puppets at the end of May and (pause for drum roll) The Who in July. Makes all this work worthwhile, we're learning to have a life somewhere amid the work - even sneaked a couple of days at the races in the last month or two and last time came home with more money than we went with. I like that, a lot.

Ah right, I was supposed to be talking about the new products we have. Biggest capture for us was being appointed a dealer for the fantastic Harder & Steenbeck airbrush range, superb quality with prices from very reasonable to "how much?". We also keep a big selection of parts and accessories.

Following the paint theme we are now approved dealers for two unique ranges - Alclad2 Laquers and the incredibly versatile UMP products. Watch out for the Alclad touring masterclass at the shop this summer - no dates yet.

The latest aquisitions are the brilliant RP Toolz products from Hungary, we tried a few out and they went down so well that now stock their whole range - superb "hold n fold" etch benders, precision punch and die sets and beatifully made etch rollers.

Alex the Cat is in trouble this week. At 16 months he's more or less an adult cat and looks like one, he just behaves like a very big spoilt kitten most of the time, this week he decided to be a grown up and brought a bird home, then another two days later. I don't like that bit of cat behaviour - even though he did look quite funny proudly marching in with his first capture - but he is a cat and it's what cats do. He'll have to learn to eat his take aways outside though.

I thought it was time to write a new bloggy thing, go to the page and find I forgot to push the button for th last one! It was never published.

The really bad news is that you get two for the price of one this month.

The buzzword around the shop this week is ....Railways. We've been teasing a bit with some Dapol and a big range of Guagemaster products, the next few days will see Hornby making an appearance on the site - it's already in the Ripon shop. We'll follow this up with a great range of scenics from some of Europes top manufacturers.

We're certainly not ignoring our kit fans, winter is coming and with it a whole load of new releases and restocks. At last th AFV Club ship has docked, lots of stuff on the way from one of our favourite armour makers.

We do have a problem though. Visitors to the shop will know Alex the Cat very well, he's a friendly little soul who loves to play with our customers, although a few have been a bit surprised by his latest trick - he hops on to people's shoulders when they're not looking. Good job he's so cute.

The problem is the lower shelves, they are always untidy because Alex likes to chuck his plastic ball around and he doesn't care who or what is in the way. So if the shop is a bit untidy, talk to the cat - he did it.

Karen

August, they say, is the quiet month for the model kit business, the month we all go on holiday - they say.

We thought it would be a great time to do some updating, give both the web site and the Ripon model shop a bit of a makeover. One day some one will talk me out of these ideas, I hope. We actually closed the shop for a week and gave it a full re fit including, at last, a proper entrance and window, we did it ourselves - every screw, joint and drop of paint is our own work and we are rather pleased with the results. The Veteranus shop is now a bigger, brighter shopping experience. So what's wrong with that? We had more visitors that week than any other since we opened, the place was a building site but still they came in pursuit of plastic. We did our best to find the goodies people wanted but a few were disappointed, hopefully they'll be back now it's all bright and shiny - sales are already up, probably because customers can actually see stuff now.

Launching straight into (another) web rebuild when we finished the shop but we wanted to get it all done during the "quiet period". Needless to say we've had our busiest internet month ever and it all had to be found, packed and despatched from the building site.

One reason we have been so busy has to be the very late arrival of some of the Spring new releases ( yes, I did say Spring). The Tamiya and HK Models Mosquitos finally turned up - two brilliant big kits, the Dragon 1:35 Huey arrived last week for it's 2014 launch - a great complimentary kit for armour fans. There's a lot of great stuff coming along including the exciting 1:24 Mk1 Escort RS1600 from Belkits, surprisingly few dealers carry these superbly detailed kits - we have them all of course.

The next big job is to get our new range of Guagemaster railway accesories on the web site, they're available in the shop now if you can't wait.

So that's nice quiet August gone, bring on September.

Phew, the rebuild is all done. Still lots of stock to load on to it but it's all working and looking good. Next project is the info pages, how to guides and tech, not rushing that though.

Apologies to anyone who ordered "ghost items" during the change over, I think we've got rid of all the little blighters now. No idea how they got in there.

More important than all that - if you're quick you could grab the beautiful Tamiya 1:12 Ducati Panigale, these were seriously under ordered by the importer and won't be around long. Next inbound shipment is February.

 

Karen

So the website revamp is taking a bit longer than expected - nothing new there. I got a bit carried away and we're having a whole new site.

So much easier to use, loads of search options + a site search that actually works.

And it's much prettier.

And the prices are so keen you'll cut yourself just looking at it.

 

Karen