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"Helping Canadian Scrapbook Retailers Be The Best They Can Be!" TM

Featured New Products

All My Memories

The new Herbanella line is completely coordinated from background papers, page accents, Herb notes, tags, and border strips.

The Hebanella colorful new background papers are printed with a pattern on one side and a coordinating solid on the other.

Let Herb Notes help you put your thoughts into words. A collection of sayings, titles and quotes are at your fingertips for a variety of occasions; ready to peel and stick to your project.

Easy to use Herbanella Tags are precision die-cut with adhesive backing. The playful tag designs are perfect accent for all your paper crafting projects. Size:5" x 13".

Finish your page with Border Strips. They add the perfect touch to any project! Adhesive-backed and die-cut.

Creating Keepsakes

Scrapbooking Christmas Memories
Preserve the magic of the winter holidays and celebrate the season by capturing special moments on film—from cherishing the warmth of family traditions to ringing in the excitement of the New Year. Scrapbooking Christmas Memories features hundreds of scrapbook pages, organizational ideas and more. You'll love using fresh page accents ideas or photo tips for the perfect finishing touch on favorite layouts of your loved ones.
Glean inspiration from its pages for scrapbooking those priceless photographs from Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa, and the New Year and make the magic of the season last forever.

American Traditional

American Traditional Designs introduces the Cats & Dogs (a colorful, contemporary collection of cute kitties and top dogs “purrfect” for pet-loving scrappers), Dear Santa (warm and whimsical Santa and all the trimmings), Winter Fun (classic snowmen will melt your heart) and Faith (an elegant collection perfect for celebrating one's faith and traditions) Collections. Each collection features coordinating papers, stickers, rub-ons, and unique embellishments.

Create that hand painted "made for you" look with easy to use Rub-Ons. Simply remove the backer, place in position, and rub with the enclosed applicator. These richly detailed images, expressions and borders will add an artistic flair to your paper crafting and home décor projects. Use to decorate paper, walls, wood, metal, glass and more!

Add pizzazz to your projects in a snap with the repositionable stickers. This collection includes an array of festive icons, catchy phrases, and expressive alphabets. These versatile stickers will enhance any page or craft project.

Be adventuresome! Lil' Templates colorful metal templates have countless applications. Emboss, stencil, trace, attach as an embellishment or combine techniques for a dramatic effect.

Dazzling Lil' Charms are the perfect accent to embellish any project. These intricately shaped and finely etched icons and words will add shimmer and depth to your pages, without adding bulk.

Add dimension and movement to your next project with Lil' Stackers. Thin by design, eye catching Lil' Stackers connect to create layers that can move independently. You may also use the elements individually for infinite arrangements!

SEI

With little or even no effort - you can create some stunning pages with any of SEI's unique designer coordinated papers. Sixty new papers are here in themed collections including SEI Sports, Seasoned, Granny's Kitchen and Hippie Chick Papers. Embellish with new SEI Ribbons and Buttons and you're done!

Sugarloaf Stamp Pads

Thirty new permanent-waterproof raised dye based ink pad colors have arrived from Sugarloaf. Use on glossy or porous papers. Inks any sized stamp. Archival.

Also new are three new Alphabet stamp sets featuring Freestyle, Comic and Swirl fonts.

Scrapbooking Tips

Scrapbooking Ideas for Fall

Take photos of foliage as it changes. Note the subtle shifting of colors. You can cut out your page title lettering from the photo backgrounds or copy and repeat the photos for backgrounds or mats.

Make a page with your favorite fall recipes. Do you make chili? Cornbread? Any dishes with zucchini or squash?

How many trick or treaters come to your house? Take some photos of the kids in costume or your kids in costume. Kids too big to trick or treat? Why not have a group over to eat pizza and watch a scary movie. Be sure to take photos!

Create a page that shows the changing climate. Of course, we all think of leaves turning, but how about the way the sky becomes so grey in the fall? The chill in the air? The sad sense of the earth's foliage dying as the sun pulls away.

Fall and winter are prime times for sports. Maybe you like to get together with friends and watch football. Is your child is playing a sport on an all-school or all-city league? Do you get together with friends to watch NFL or college or high school football? Make a page!

Consider how you "winterize" your home. Do you bring in firewood? Change the foods you buy-like stocking up on soups? Put away summer sandals? Cover the roses? Change the wreath outside your door to be more seasonal? Put away the screen windows and Citronella candles? How could you share these small rituals of fall? 

Helping Canadian Retailers Be The BEST They Can Be!

Each week we try to bring you a business article to help improve your business and give you something to think about.

15 customer service no-nos

By Monte Enbysk

Sometimes it seems like rude customer service is the rule rather than the exception. But there's rude — and then there's rude.
When it comes to getting customer service, what's your definition of rude? What unprofessional behavior irritates you the most when, as a consumer, you are interacting by phone with another company?

Sometimes, customer service that is perceived as rude is not intentional and often is the result of absent-mindedness or carelessness on behalf of an employee. Either way, bad customer service can translate into lower sales and lost business, says Nancy Friedman, president and founder of the Telephone Doctor, a St. Louis-based customer service training company.
Based on its own surveys, the Telephone Doctor has compiled the 15 biggest sins of customer service employees today. They are listed below, along with Telephone Doctor's guidelines (in parentheses) on how to do it right.

1. Your employees are having a bad day, and their foul mood carries over in conversations with customers. (Everyone has bad days, but customer service employees need to keep theirs to themselves.)

2. Your employees hang up on angry customers. (Ironclad rule: Never hang up on a customer.)

3. Your company doesn't return phone calls or voice-mail messages, despite listing your phone number on your Web site and/or in ads and directories. (Call customers back as soon as you can, or have calls returned on your behalf.)

4. Your employees put callers on hold without asking them first, as a courtesy. (Ask customers politely if you can put them on hold; very few will complain or say "No way!")

5. Your employees put callers on a speaker phone without asking them first if it is OK. (Again: Ask first, as a courtesy.)

6. Your employees eat, drink or chew gum while talking with customers on the phone. (A telephone mouthpiece is like a microphone; noises can easily be picked up. Employees need to eat their meals away from the phone. And save that stick of gum for break time.)

7. You have call-waiting on your business lines, and your employees frequently interrupt existing calls to take new calls. (One interruption in a call might be excusable; beyond that, you are crossing the "rude" threshold. Do your best to be prepared with enough staff for peak calling times.)

8. Your employees refuse or forget to use the words "please," "thank you" or "you're welcome." (Please use these words generously, thank you.)

9. Your employees hold side conversations with friends or each other while talking to customers on the phone, or they make personal calls on cell phones in your call center. (Don't do either of these.)

10. Your employees seem incapable of offering more than one-word answers. (One-word answers come across as rude and uncaring.)

11. Your employees do provide more than one-word answers, but a lot of the words are grounded in company or industry jargon that many customers don't understand. (If you sell tech products, for example, don't casually drop in abbreviations such as APIs, ISVs, SMTP or TCP/IP.)

12. Your employees request that customers call them back when the employees aren't so busy. (Customers should never be told to call back. Request the customer's number instead.)

13. Your employees rush through calls, forcing customers off the phone at the earliest opportunity. (Be a little more discreet. Politely suggest that you've got the information you need and you must move on to other calls.)

14. Your employees obnoxiously bellow "What's this in reference to?" effectively humbling customers and belittling their requests. (Screening techniques can be used with a little more warmth and finesse. If a caller has mistakenly come your way, do your best to point him or her in the right direction.)

15. Your employees freely admit to customers that they hate their jobs. (This simply makes the entire company look bad. And don't think such a moment of candor or lapse in judgment won't get back to the boss.)

In defense of customer service workers, customers can be rude too. And customer service jobs can often be thankless, with little motivation or incentive to do the job right.

But the problem here is that life for customer service employees may not be fair. Customers can be rude and get away with it. Employees cannot — if they want to help their companies to succeed and keep their jobs as well.