OurGreenRoom - Winners of Theo Paphitis Small Business Sunday Award

We are absolutely delighted to announce that this week, OurGreenRoom were chosen by no other than the legend that is Theo Paphitis as one of his winners in his weekly twitter competition; Small Business Sunday, or #SBS as it's known in Twitter land!

Theo runs a weekly competition, whereby between the hours of 5pm - 7pm on a Sunday, if you tweet him about your business he will take a look at your site or page and picks six lucky winners to retweet from his page; basically advertising your business for you to 145,000+ followers. Its almost like being mentioned on television or radio by a celebrity, and the fact that he is renowned for being a retail guru; it makes it all the more exciting if you are a retailer - the big man approves! Literally hundreds of thousands of businesses exist on Twitter and to be personally selected is, well, a great honour - and as Robbi put it - that's a big deal!

Armed with a sentence about our business, I tweeted Theo at around 5.30pm. I really didn’t expect to win, since it was the first time we had entered, and I had only been on Twitter actively for about a week after a fellow shop owner from Bradford -on-Avon, Jackie (runs Piha surf n' ski at the top of the hill) suggested that I should really get into it at a Women's Business Networking Meeting she runs.

I pondered over the Tweet for a while, thinking about why I felt we deserved a re-tweet. People often tell us that they think what we do is amazing, we have 3 children including an 8 month old, are only 27 and 29 years of age and work 24/7 on our business both online and in the shop. People are also surprised to discover that all the products are made by hand, by me, that I do all the accounts and that we designed the website from scratch, all by ourselves. I design, Robbi fills in! Not only that but people LOVE our products when they see how bright and colourful they are. Even when they might not be to someone’s taste, they can’t fail to bring a smile.

Sometimes if we have a bad couple of weeks it's hard to keep on believing in yourself, you start to doubt what you do, doubt the products, think; what are we doing wrong! One single complaint can knock our confidence, but the overwhelming amount of positive feedback from our site and products keeps us going - and what a boost in confidence, to be officially 'liked' by Theo Paphitis himself! Obviously he has not scrutinized the business in detail, but the first impression was a good one, and that is what is most important in retail. If you fail at the first meeting with your potential customer or business partner, they won't come back.

So how could I sum all that up in 160 characters? Hmm well quite a few of those is taken up by @TheoPaphitis, and including the compulsory #SBS tag. Doesn’t leave much.

I decided to be honest, human, but commercial too. So including our strap line (which sums up what we do and our style), our ages (as that seems to be quite a good selling point), the fact that we have 3 kids (so we must work very hard - which we do), and that we have determination to succeed. Here is what I wrote:

"Brighten up your home! Exciting new home decor shop run by determined 27/29 yr old parents of 3 - from scratch!"

I don't know if it was the tweet or the site that got us a win, why don’t you let us know what you think. Visit the site http://www.ourgreenroom.co.uk/ and get in touch - info@ourgreenroom.co.uk

Right, now back to work!