With the arrival of April we have finally entered a new financial year and our sales figures for 2011/2012 have been analysed.  We achieved a 40% increase on the previous year with sales of MERU products amounting to £47,440.  Considering what a challenging year it was for MERU as an organisation, and the global economic climate as a whole, we are feeling quite pleased with ourselves!  However, far from resting on our laurels, we are aiming to do much better this year. With our new website, new products, marketing initiatives and vaulting ambitions we think another 40% is well within reach (not including the TravelChair, of course).  To get things off to a flying start we have ordered tooling for our new zip pulls and will shortly have samples.  We will be able to offer this simple and highly effective product at a very competitive price due to outsourcing its manufacture.  It will be available in three colours, in various multipacks, and has the potential to be useful to a very wide range of people.  Look out for it in our webshop (opening soon).

The Workshop Team soldiers on, still attracting new members.  It’s being run by Vicky and Tom for three weeks while my regular babysitter takes a holiday in New Zealand (we must be paying her too much.  Oh, no, we don’t pay her at all!  Perhaps that’s why she’s gone to New Zealand).   In other developments, the “Splatz XL” mould is under construction (a super-sized Splatz for big buttons).  Hayley at Such and Such Design organised the machining for us at South Bank University.  [She’s getting married next weekend in France – looking forward to that!  Hayley started life as a student at MERU about 10 years ago, then worked for us for some years and finally left to start her own business.  Another MERU success story…].  We have also adjusted the design of the new Grabzi to accommodate a slightly different handle, and we’ve started work on the Grabzi Switch, a grab handle switching device which will join the Grabzi/Groovz range of products.  And orders continue to flow in with a notable increase in direct sales which we attribute to Vicky’s wonderful new website.  All in all a very positive outlook…

Ready Made Product Development, by Peter Swann

The financial year is drawing to a close and it’s time to look back and see what we have achieved and look forward and make new plans.  I don’t have all the figures yet, more of that next month, but it has certainly been our best year yet for sales of ready-made products (as they are now officially known!).  The merger of our distributor, QED, with Inclusive Technology seems to have been an important factor in our sales growth.  They are simply a much bigger company with an enormous client base.

Workshop Team has been a huge success, but I won’t go on about it here, except to say a big thank you to all concerned.  I have written a thorough review of its activities which will be in our April Friends Update.

March has been at least as busy as February but as it comes to an end I sense a slight easing of the pressure.  The end-of-year sales bulge seems to have been well managed by Inclusive who successfully spread it out over a couple of months.  We’ve had quite a good throughput of direct sales as well, though, culminating in a Bugzi for Richard Cloudesley School which was delivered this week.  They were also responsible for purchasing our first Groovz (new arm guide product) and Grabzi (grab handle).  That’s the power of the product demo! Tom, ever resourceful, managed to find time for yet another Flexzi invention (see photo. Launch date 1st April 2012 before midday :-)) 

Also keeping us busy throughout March has been the new website, now officially launched.  An immense amount of work has gone into this, leading to much anguish and tearing out of hair, but the result is superb and really shows MERU off at its best. The shop bit will be ready in a couple of weeks – it’s the most complicated part from a programming point of view.  It will showcase a number of new products and make them much, much easier to buy.

And finally, of course, by the time you read this we will officially be a part of the QEF family of charities. http://www.qef.org.uk/  Without QEF we would no longer be here.  Yes, really, it came that close.  We are delighted to be under their umbrella now and look forward to an era of greater stability and access to new resources.  MERU ready-mades are all set to go from strength to strength!