Archive: April ’12 on The Blog

It’s a huge week today at Lima Beads. Did you expect us to say something different? Haha. In all seriousness, we have 160 new products including designer Czech Glass, gemstones, and new freshwater pearls.

New Czech Glass

Our line of designer Czech Glass has been so popular that we couldn’t help from expanding it. Back on March 15, we added about 100 shapes. And today, we’re adding another hundred. They’re absolutely awesome! We have some new shapes, too… my favorite is the ammonite fossil. There are also some tiny little teardrops, daisies, ovals, and even a few owls. Check out all the new Czech!

Gemstone Bead Additions

We added a smorgasbord of gemstone shapes & sizes to the site today. There are 30 total, and they range from small rounds to big drops in a variety of stones. Many of the stones bring back the memories from almost 10 years ago when we first started selling gemstones online–mookaite, bronzite, carnelian, tiger eye, and more. There’s also a little titanium druzy nugget that caught our eye–love it! Check out the pics for all the new gemstones.

New Freshwater Pearls

It’s been a while since we’ve been able to tell you that we added over 20 freshwater pearls. So we’re happy to do it today! The freshwater pearl additions include 8 pearly white shapes, a few peacock shapes, and some brand new colors.

Today, we’d like to announce a new feature on our website that we think will make it easier to stay on top of everything that’s going on at Lima Beads. We’re calling it What’s Fresh and you can find it by clicking the “Fresh” option at the top of the website. We really hope you like it.

What’s the big deal?

I’ll be very honest with you all. With the hundreds of Fresh Picks, design ideas, tips & techniques, new products, restocks, and more that happen here every month, it’s really hard for us to keep track of it all. So we started thinking of ways to combine it all into one easy view, organized by date. We’re thrilled with the results.

When we were creating this page, one thing was abundantly clear: we have our customers to thank for so much of what goes on around here. We’re grateful for everyone’s willingness to share their design ideas, Fresh Picks, comments, pictures, and more. We wouldn’t be here without you.

Your feedback is important to us!

As always, we would love your feedback on the new What’s Fresh page. You can leave your comments below!

TOHO 11/0 Round Seed Beads

We’re continuing to grow our TOHO seed bead selection, and we’ve got almost a hundred new 11/0 rounds for you to see. There are tons of bright colors and fun finishes. Check out all the pics.

New Gemstones

We have some new brightly-colored agate, druzy pieces, cool drops & some old favorites. See all the new additions.

Glass Garden Additions

Now if these aren’t the coolest embellishments, I don’t know what are! These bottle caps and glass pieces from Glass Garden remind me of summer–and are extra cool because they’re recycled materials. See if you recognize anything from the list of additions. I knew a few, but didn’t recognize them all!

Well, it’s on from one thing (Easter Egg Hunt) and onto the next (Spring Rain Contest Wrap-up). The winners have been selected… and you’ll find the results below.

The Winners

There were 50 Spring Rain designs submitted, racking up over 700 “Add to Favorites!” Based on the number of favorites and activity, here are the three winners of the Vintaj Spring Rain contest:

First Place: Spring Rain – Dance in the Rain by JustImagine – Val

From the designer:

“Made from the Spring Rain Necklace Kit. I did a little play on words and made my own “Spring(s)” for this design. This was so much fun!”

This was by far your favorite design in the contest. Not only were there a ton of favorites, JustImagine – Val also received a lot of praise in the comments. Here are a few comments:

“Very beautiful and creative. A one of a kind piece.” – R Grizzuto

“Absolutely stunning! The “springs” are a wonderful detail! I love the colors!” – Violet D

This is such a beautiful piece and so creative. I would love one just like it. And the photos to display it were very unique. Good luck, Val!

Second Place: Raindrops & Posies by D Beach

From the designer:

“The thing that I love most about Spring rains, is how the lingering raindrops seem to bring out the beauty and color of the flowers. I wanted to create a bracelet that combined the beauty of raindrops and flowers.”

Designer D Beach mentioned in her comments that this was the first time she entered a piece into a contest! So much for practice makes perfect…

Third Place: It’s Raining, It’s Pouring! by Bucci Handmade Jewelry

From the designer:

“I made this piece for the Vintaj Spring Rain contest. I made dangles of all the glass and pearl beads and hung them from some Arte Metal chain. The simple S-hook clasp allows you to adjust the length of the necklace to suit your desire.”

The pearl and glass drops in this necklace are the perfect metaphor for the “Spring Rain” theme. It’s great to see how far super-creative people like Bucci Handmade Jewelry can push the limits of a basic kit.

All of our winners will be contacted shortly with their gift certificate codes. Thanks to everyone who participated in the contest, and we want to give a special thanks to Vintaj. This was our first time working this closely with them, and we hope that you had as much fun as we did! We’re looking forward to working with them again in the future.

We have 3 big product additions this week: Czech glass 2 hole tile beads, incredible Patricia Healey copper, and a huge expansion of our Soft Flex line.

Czech 2 Hole Tile Beads

We’ve added about 50 colors of these 6mm tiles. 2 hole tile beads have been very popular lately. Because they’re flat and square, they’re perfect for joining two strands together. They can also be stitched together on a loom or by using a variety of different stitches. The possibilities are endless!

Patricia Healey Spring Collection

Patricia has really outdone herself this time. We’re in love with this collection of beads, charms, pendants, findings, and even CHAIN. It’s all in her ultra colorful copper finish and the designs are so much fun. If you like the look, shop the entire line of Patricia Healey copper.

Soft Flex Expansion

We’ve added about 40 new items to our Soft Flex line. You’ll find lots of fun colors and finishes. Many of the new styles are meant to match gemstone colors. These include: tanzanite, red jasper, turquoise, emerald, and more. They’re beautiful.

Vintaj called us early this year and asked us to be their April online bead partner. They wrote a nice blog post about us and posted some photos of Ali’s work. You can see it here:

Spring Rain Online Bead Partner – Lima Beads

This was exciting! We’re really enjoyed working with Vintaj on the Spring Rain promotion this month. They’re a talented group of people!

The 2012 Easter Egg Hunt was a crazy ride! 4,338 people hunted for eggs and every egg was found at least once this year. I’d like to announce the winners and address some of the concerns from this year’s hunt.

The Winners

First of all, congrats to the winners of the 3 $25 “Golden Egg” gift certificates! Here are the winners:

• GypsyMom
• Jeanne S
• B Miller

If you’re one of the three winners above, we’ll be sending you a gift certificate by e-mail. Congratulations!

Now, for the moment you’ve all been waiting for. The winner of the $250 Lima Beads gift certificate is… J Pilkington! She found a total of 77 eggs, which put her in 9th place on the leaderboard with a chance to win the big prize. You can watch the video of how we picked her name on Facebook. Congratulations, J Pilkington!

The Second Prize is a $100 Gift Certificate, awarded to Snowy, who was in an 8-way tie for 65th on the leaderboard with 55 eggs found.

Congratulations to you both! We’ll contact you directly with your prize.

The Golden Eggs

We never imagined how quickly the golden eggs would be found this year. We thought the hiding places were super hard! Here’s a picture of where the three golden eggs were hidden:

The pictures above show the golden eggs on the following pages: the 12mm Winter Shell Pearl Mix, a search for “golden egg”, and on the “Add to Fresh Pick” screen for the Abalone 1″ Silk Ribbon. Congrats to those who found the golden eggs first. We’ll contact you directly about your prize.

The Hardest Hunt Yet…

It’s been widely publicized that the hunt was more difficult this year than last year. We agree! We thought it would be a nice surprise to launch a new web site for the hunt, but doing so made the eggs difficult to find. We weren’t able to gauge how good our hiding places would be because we hadn’t had a chance to spend much time on the new site. As it turns out, they were very good hiding places. We’re sorry it was so difficult. We hope that the extra prize helped and YES, it’ll be easier next year

Shipping Fees

Some people expressed displeasure with the shipping fees. Our goal is to make the Easter Egg Hunt as cool as possible, and we wish we could ship the prizes for free–but we just can’t afford to. We always put a statement in the rules about how normal shipping rates apply to set expectations, but some people were still disappointed–and we want you to know that we totally understand. We know it’s not the cheapest thing out there (in fact, it costs us MORE than the $4.95 we charge you). Even though it’s a little more expensive, we keep using USPS Priority Mail because it’s fast and trackable. It wasn’t the most popular choice, but rest assured that we are never out to make money on shipping fees.

Thanks Again!

Even though it was hard, we hope that everyone had fun finding those blasted eggs. We’re turning our attention to the rest of 2012 now, and we have some awesome things in store. One thing is for sure… we think we have the best customers on the planet, and we’ll continue to try as hard as we can to put together fun & crazy promotions for everyone to enjoy. Thanks again for making this the most exciting week of the year for us, and keep your eyes on the blog for more fun in the future.

There’s a bunch of crystal and shell pearls that just got added to the special buy section. Special buys happen at Lima Beads for a number of reasons. In this case, some of the items in a shipment didn’t match the colors of our previous stock. We’re very picky about the color consistency of our crystal and shell pearls. So, if it arrives here and doesn’t match perfectly with the color we’ve sold you before, we won’t sell it as the same color — we make it a special buy. If you like the colors you see, you can pick them up at a discount, but you may never be able to get them from us again. When they’re gone – they’re gone! See all special buys now.

The 2012 Easter egg hunt is here! This is the fourth annual hunt! If this will be your first Lima Beads Easter Egg Hunt, it’s simple. We’ve hidden Easter eggs (a lot of Easter eggs) on our web site. Find them and win beads, supplies, coupons and even gift certificates.

This year’s hunt is very similar to last year’s with two exceptions:

1. We’ve tried to make the hunt a bit easier by not hiding eggs in any blog posts, designs or fresh picks that were created before 2012. So, you don’t need to go digging through thousands of blog posts, fresh picks and designs…
2. Second, there’s a BIG twist this year. We’ve just launched a completely new web site. We’ve been working day and night to get it ready for the hunt, which is why the hunt launched a few days later than normal We hope you love it. We set out to make it as easy as possible to find what you’re looking for… Unless you’re looking for eggs. We hid those really well!

100 Easter Eggs

That’s right, there are 100 eggs hidden on the web site RIGHT NOW (plus an additional 3 special GOLDEN eggs). They’re scattered all over the Lima Beads web site. The only pages where you won’t find eggs is on blog posts, designs or fresh picks that were created before 2012. As you find eggs, you’ll see this status bar:

We don’t want anyone to go crazy, so we should tell you up front: finding all the Easter eggs will be difficult. Some of them are very well hidden. It’s not really about finding ALL of the eggs this year, it’s about finding the most and getting to the top of the leaderboard!

The Leaderboard

Just like last year, there’s a leaderboard that shows the top 100 hunters. See the Leaderboard.

Prizes

The more eggs you find, the more prizes you get. When you reach 10, 25, 35, 50, and 75 eggs a new set of prizes will be unlocked. You can choose from a variety of FREE beads and even a collection of coupons worth 15% – 20% off various items. There are also prizes associated with the Leaderboard. At the end of the Easter Egg Hunt, the top 10 people on the leaderboard will be entered to win The Grand Prize, a $250 Lima Beads Gift Certificate. Everyone else on the leaderboard will be entered to win second prize, a $100 Lima Beads gift certificate. See all the prizes.

The Golden Eggs

This year, we’re also hiding 3 special golden eggs (in addition to the 100 eggs, making a grand total of 103)… If you’re the very first one to find a golden egg, you’ll win a $25 Gift Certificate to our store! If the same person finds multiple golden eggs, that lucky beader will win one $25 gift certificate for each golden egg they find. Yowza! The golden eggs don’t count towards your leaderboard total, and you can keep an eye on who’s found the golden eggs on the leaderboard.

Rules

• The contest ends at 11:59pm on April 8, 2012 (Easter). This means you need to make sure and do the following by this time:
  • Collect all the eggs you can find.
  • If you unlocked any prizes, add them to your shopping bag and place your order—all prizes (except the discount code explained below) must be redeemed by the end of the contest. Normal shipping rates will apply.
  • If you unlocked the coupon prize, write down your coupon code (you can use it any time until the end of 2012)
  • Watch the blog for an announcement about the $250 drawing
• There are a total of 100 Easter eggs plus an additional 3 “golden” eggs that we’ve hidden for you to collect. Those are the only ones that count toward the prizes, and you must click on them to collect them. You might see some picture of eggs in promotional materials (like the ones in the grass at the top of this page)… those don’t count toward your total.
• We can’t offer rain checks on the prizes, so make sure to place your order when you’ve unlocked the prizes, because they’re only available while supplies last!
• We think we have enough free beads to go around… but in case we run short, we reserve the right to substitute a product of equal value as your prize (hey, it’s free, right?) . We can’t offer rain checks on unavailable prizes. We also reserve the right to update this list of rules if it needs clarification later.
• Normal shipping rates apply. As much as we’d like to, we just can’t afford to give away free beads AND ship them for free too. If you add your prizes to an order over $40, you’ll get the same free shipping you always get (inside the USA). If your order is under $40, normal shipping rates will apply to it.
• Please don’t share the locations of the eggs. This ruins the fun for everyone Also, you must find the eggs yourself–you can’t have a robot (or a computer) do it for you. Location sharers and robots will be disqualified from winning prizes! Gotta keep it fair for the rest of us!
• The most important rule: have fun!

We’re sorry for the delay on the Easter Egg Hunt, it’ll be live shortly. We’re working on something big…