Well, by happy happenstance, today’s exclusive offer was headlined by two Brand Labs’ clients: Madison Avenue Couture and Lois Hill.  Both new store designs are still in progress, so we can’t link you to them, but trust us when we say they’re both fabulous and fierce.

It’s always exciting to see a client featured in another outlet (unless it’s on COPS or 60 Minutes) so today we’re doubly pleased.

Our founders spent some time at the recent Internet Retailers Conference and Exhibition in Chicago, and a good portion of that time was spent in the company of our bestest friends at Volusion.  Here you’ll see Volusion’s video recap of the event and starting at about 1:22 you can see Dane and Kevin (from left to right) talking about the future of eCommerce.  Their answer is pretty lengthy just because it would be rude to say, “The future of eCommerce is Brand Labs,” before throwing some gang signs and walking off camera (which was the original plan).

(via Volusion)

Attendance for the conference was up significantly over last year and the prevailing tone was overwhelmingly optimistic, as eCommerce continues to assert its critical position in the world of consumer retail operations as a whole.  The obvious buzzword (or buzzphrase, if you will) was mobile commerce, and as the first developers of a mobile Volusion platform, we weren’t surprised one little bit.  Hit the jump to see a few pics of Brand Labs with all the party people…

Our fearless leaders, Kevin Harman and Dane Downer at the Stamps.com/Volusion mixer

Here we have Paul Goldman, CEO of Juiced Hybrids, Adelle Rodriguez from Volusion's marketing department with our perpetually smiling leader, Kevin

Finally, (clockwise from the left) there's our own Dane Downer with Andy Humphrey from EcoMowers.com, Mac Harman (no relation to our prez) from Balsam Hill, and (once again) Adelle Rodriguez from Volusion

If you’d like to set something up, you can email Dane at dane.downer@brandlabs.us or Kevin at kevin.harman@brandlabs.us, or just look for these happy, smiling faces on the show floor (Dane’s on the left, Kevin on the right).  They’re prepared at all times to drop some eCommerce knowledge.

Word.

If we may paraphrase the immortal Stan Lee: With great gratitude comes great responsibility.  With that in mind, we’ve chosen to launch our first ongoing philanthropic effort: Brand Labs’ One Laptop Per Child Per Week program.  Through this program, we will be donating one OLPC XO laptop every week.  These laptops are given to children all over the globe (and right here in the States) to encourage education and connectivity in communities that are lacking in both.

We’re proud of this effort and we’ll mention it every single chance we get, and not because we want you to think we’re super awesome.  We’re going to keep mentioning it because we’d like to encourage all of our customers and friends to consider giving to this very worthy cause… or the worthy cause of their choice.

Over the past decade, the world has proven two things to us.  First, it can be a very cruel place.  Second (and more importantly), mankind has a seemingly boundless capacity for giving, both from the heart and from the wallet.

We’ve taken a small step toward becoming the kind of corporate neighbor we intend to be.  We’d be delighted if you’d like to join in…

Of course, we’ve always made our feelings about Volusion pretty clear.  We’ve counted and there are over 23 bazillion uses of the word Volusion scattered throughout our site and at least one member of our staff has the Volusion logo tattooed on a very private region of their body, so we’re obviously down with the V, but it’s gratifying to know that our devotion is reciprocated.  How reciprocated?  Well, here’s what Volusion has to say about us:

“Over the past ten years, we’ve had the privilege to develop several relationships in becoming a leading ecommerce provider. One that stands out above the rest is our partnership with Brand Labs, an indispensable asset to our community. When we launched the Volusion Partner Network, we gladly welcomed Brand Labs as an Agency Partner. We are eager to further extend our collaboration with Brand Labs into the future by focusing on what is best in helping our merchants succeed.”

James Booker – Business Development Manager – Volusion

… to be fair, we added the bold to the “indispensable asset” part, but that was our favorite bit.

We look forward to the continuation of our long and happy partnership.  Thanks Volusion!

The new platform operates entirely within FaceBook, the ubiquitous social media network, offering merchants an exciting new opportunity to connect to their customers in new ways.

ShopFans isn’t simply a store within FaceBook.  Its features allow customers to interact with the store… sharing links, creating wishlists and allowing users to “Like” specific items.

(via TechCrunch)

He’ll be attending conferences, shamelessly networking and handing out business cards like there’s no tomorrow.  If you see him and you want to learn a heck of a lot about Volusion marketing services, please be sure to introduce yourself.

… the rest of us, on the other hand, will be back here in Michigan, holding down the fort.  We sure as heck won’t be sneaking out early just because the boss is out of town.  No way.  Not us.

From Wikipedia:

RSS (most commonly expanded as “Really Simple Syndication”) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format…The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the reader the feed’s URI or by clicking an RSS icon in a web browser that initiates the subscription process.

So, if you’d like to subscribe to our posts, you can do so by clicking on the icon at the top of the column to the right, or if you’re viewing our mobile version, tap the little menu arrow on the right side of the header and a menu will pop up.  Thanks!

… but what exactly does that mean?

Well, it basically boils down to two things.  First, we’ve exceeded the required minimum AdWords spend within  programs that we manage.  As a matter of fact, we overshot the minimum by 50% (because we’re a bunch of brown-nosing Google-lovers).  Second, we had to have three staffers take and pass the AdWords certification test.  We’ve got five, meaning that we overshot that target by 66.6%.

Now, we’re not math scientists or anything, but we’re pretty sure that those two facts make us 116% more qualified than we need to be in order to be totally awesome by Google’s standards.  That’s a pretty high percentage of awesomeness, so you may want to check into our Pay Per Click management program… unless you hate awesomeness and high ROI.