AvantiShops.com

When have they ever gone OUT of style? Animal prints have been around forever, from our earliest ancestors’ use of skins for clothing to Victorian status symbols in carpets, furniture, and stuffed heads gracing high society’s library walls.

Translated into fabrics, what began as racy lingerie 50 years ago moved into the realm of “daring” in the late 70’s and early 80’s, progressed to “fashion statement” in the 90’s and now holds steady as a dominant feature in clothing, shoes, accessories and jewellery.

Check out any fashion magazine, from Vogue to Simplicity Patterns, any retailer, from Neiman Marcus to Wal-Mart, and there they are, larger than life and in a rainbow of colors: traditional zebra, tiger and leopard along with new-fangled giraffe and faux turtle, lizard and snakeskin, in anything and everything you can imagine: underwear, dresses, pants, scarves, belts, hats, gloves, trim, shoes, hair accessories, watchbands, handbags, and of course, ta-da! - jewellery.

We’ve come a long way from the days when buying leopard-print underwear was akin to having “L-O-O-S-E” written in bold, indelible red ink across one’s forehead. Now it just means you’re chic.

One of the hottest trends right now is metallics, they’ve been on the rise since last fall and now they are everywhere…. accessories, shoes, jewellery, clothing, accents. My daily subscriptions to Bergdorf’s, Neiman Marcus, Saks, Forzieri and other high end retailers have been showing variations several times a week, for months, and it’s not slowing down. Designers are refining sheen and sparkle….. (sequins are out!) …. and the Austrian crystal-maker Swarovski is having a field day.

Remember when you were a kid, mooning your way through Birks? (I don’t know what the US equivalent would be, maybe Tiffany’s). Swarovski crystal used to be seen almost exclusively at Canadian jewellery retailers like Birks, in the form of little animals and birds and other gewgaws. In recent years their emphasis has moved to faceted beads, and new colors and shapes are now a regular production feature. Swarovski crystal is expensive. Precision machine-cutting and polishing produces perfect facets that sparkle like diamonds. An example of a necklace that is almost all Swarovski crystals is here.

Naturally, it has imitators. Less pricey is Czech crystal, and the least expensive is made in China. However in comparing the three there are significant visual differences. primarily in faceting and finish. Unfortunately along with the imitation there is also a trend to misrepresent cheaper crystal as Swarovski. So if you see a great-looking piece of jewellery that claims to use Swarovski crystal and has a low, low price-tag, beware. Make a trip to your nearest bead shop to make a comparison between the three varieties. The difference is pretty obvious when they’re right in front of you.

The Gift Certificates that AvantiShops carries have a feature that makes them much more “user-friendly” than what you are probably used to seeing.

They are “virtual e-certificates” which means that there is no paper. The amount of the voucher shows in your voucher balance on your “My Account” page

Now here’s what’s different: You can buy, for example, a $100 voucher and split it up into different amounts to send to your gift recipients at different times. The amount of each one can be anything you want, within that $100.

You send the amount from within your AvantiShops account, so it records your recipient, their email address and the amount of the gift.

The shop system keeps track of this information so as soon as your recipient creates their account, the gift voucher balance will show on their “My Account” page.

Pretty nifty!

We will soon have a “Gift Reminder” feature, that enables you to receive an automated AvantiShops reminder that someone’s birthday or wedding or occasion is coming up! Now that’s handy!

I have a drawbox in my Avanti Glass gallery, for visitors to enter their names and email addresses for a monthly draw. I won’t be publishing the name or other personal information because of privacy laws and my own privacy standards.

However, I can say that the April winner is from Salt Spring Island, and is someone who brought some visitors through the gallery. I had one of today’s visitors do the draw, so it was a bit of an “event!”

The winner of the monthly draw receives an AvantiShops gift certificate. As soon as they have registered, I can release the gift certificate into their account.

If you can’t come to Salt Spring, you still have an opportunity to win a gift certificate by registering an account and subscribing to the newsletter. This is a monthly draw as well. Have fun shopping!