Marked For Life Limited started trading as a Limited Company on the 20th June 2000.
My idea was to introduce a centralised registration database for use in security marking household equipment, this idea came about when I moved house and all the equipment I had was marked with the postcode of our old address.
I was working full time as a Compaq accredited (and IBM but I don't like to mention that) server engineer and this register was run in my spare time.
I had one of the IT guys at one of my customers build me a database and I started to promote it, after a month or two I had a total of 2 people on the database, me and my brother, this was a disaster so far but I never gave up and started to look around, I thought that giving a free security marking pen would encourage more customers, I found a supplier who sold them so I continued to promote my business and got them printed with the company name and a free phone number, again no response, after all this is a thing that people want after they have been burgled and rarely before.
I was selling pens on their own and people were buying so I thought I would expand on the security side and sold another product that the pen supplier was selling, panic alarms! they were a British panic alarm manufacturer, I built my own web site using Microsoft Frontpage and using an online shopping cart system I built my store front.
This was a great hit we were the only store selling a panic alarm selection on the internet that had our own store front, we were getting number 1 page positions on the Google search engine for everything we sold.
We decided to add more products and found a supplier for a dummy security camera, we added these to our website and they proved a great hit so we added the rest of the products supplied by the same supplier to our site, again we were getting front page hits for everything we added.
One thing that we added was pest control products, these were such a hit that sales for these quickly overtook our security products, I like animals and because these products worked with out harming the animal we had a lot of confidence in selling them and put them pride of place on our website.
I was a bit dubious about selling these to start with because they used ultrasonic sound I was not sure that they actually did what was said on the package being unable to test it myself, but after many sales and many good responses and repeat orders from satisfied customers they stayed at the top of our sales to this very day.
So we were getting good sales from our store, what happened to the security register, well in a word nothing, we could not make it a success, had I the knowledge to design a website to automate it it may have worked, It may show its face in the future but no plans at present.
We are constantly adding new products to our site and trying to keep most items cheaper than available anywhere else.
We still rank well on Google but unfortunately there are a lot of cheap imported panic alarms coming into the country, we still sell the panic alarm products from our initial supplier these are very high quality UK designed and built alarms, We also sell a range of alarms that are imported but are tested by Sold Secure and meet their stringent guidelines to be declared Sold Secure approved.
The supplier of these cheap imported alarms has damaged but not destroyed the industry, we can beat their prices with our quality assured panic alarms, you will not be sold a dud by us our alarms will not let you down when you need them.
For More information visit our store at www.mflshop.co.uk
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