In our travels on the interweb we came across a great site, wordle.net, that creates word clouds from content of your choice. You can enter in text, a blog, or a RSS feed. Out comes the word cloud. Very cool stuff. Below is the word cloud for the home page of bgreenlifestyle.com.
Word cloud courtesy of wordle.netArchive for the ‘Website & Blog’ Category
bGreen’s Word Cloud
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010Suggest a product to bGreen
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010We get asked all the time about carrying new and exciting eco friendly
products. We work hard to make sure we keep up with the latest products and trends, but occasionally we’ll miss something totally awesome.
So, we’ve decided to make it super easy for you to suggest a new product to us. If you’re a manufacturer, salesman, or just a fanboy/girl, we want to hear from you! Simply follow the link below, fill out the required information, and we’ll be in touch.
Jeffrey Cutler
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010So I decided to take a break from Chatrouletting and write the post I promised on our meeting a few weeks ago with a young entrepreneur who is a friend of a friend. Our good friend Brian Kramer, who handles the PR responsibilities for bGreen, works at Fama PR, a high-tech public relations firm in Cambridge, MA. Brian works with Jeffrey Cutler, who serves as Director of New Media at Fama. Brian hooked us up with Jeff, and we got together a few weeks ago to talk bGreen, entrepreneurship, and business. The meeting was great (although my buffalo chicken fingers left a little to be desired).
A little bit about Jeff. Jeff was part of the original team at Going.com, which was acquired by AOL a short time ago. If you read the reports (which we have), they were bought for something around $10 million, after a VC investment of around $5 million. Whether it’s true or not, we have no idea. But Jeff is out and about pursing a ton of different opportunities, and that’s what we were really interested in. Jeff has expertise in sales, marketing, SEO, web design, new media, etc etc etc. The list goes on, but needless to say, he’s got a ton of experience, and we’re always grateful to anyone who will talk to us. You can read more about Jeff at his website JeffreyCutler.com.
So we wanted to meet with Jeff basically just to pick his brain. We wanted to learn his thoughts on SEO, our website, and our business concept. It’s was pretty eye opening, and a lot of what we’ve been working on the past couple weeks has been based on our meeting with Jeff. Our website re-design, which was coming at some point anyway, was really sparked by Jeff’s comments. He pointed out several elements we were missing that we’ve since incorporated into our site. Search, professionalism, and security were key topics of our discussion. You can see this reflected in our site, with a new design, prominently featured search, and security features displayed, like our Network Solutions SSL certification. Jeff has knowledge about what online shoppers are looking for, and we wanted to make sure our customers have a simple and secure shopping experience.
There’s a lot of back-end work happening with our website that our customers will never see. However, we want to make sure that if you Google “klean kanteen” or “eco friendly trash bags” bGreen is one of the top results. We’re making changes to our site to ensure this happens. Jeff runs a website, allwhitekicks.com, that has some great technology and SEO built in, and we’ve been taking some cues from his site to help with ours.
Finally, one of the main suggestions Jeff made was to just get out there and sell. Sell, sell, sell. Promote bGreen like crazy. We’re doing this, and are about to ramp up our efforts around town. With our bGreen Mobile Showroom, Square, and plenty of events coming up this Spring, we’re certain bGreen will become the leader in green and eco friendly products in Boston and on the web.
A New Look
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010It’s been a busy few weeks for bGreen. We’ve been working on a website re-design, and if you’ve ever attempted one of these things, you’ll know it’s no easy task. One change leads to 50 others, and so on and so on. It just never ends.
There are many reasons we opted to re-design the site. We received some great feedback from our valued customers and friends. We searched the web to find sites we really liked, and adopted some of their design elements. We received advice from some a successful web entrepreneur (more about that in the next post). The result is what you see today at bgreenlifestyle.com.
We wanted to make the shopping experience easier, safer, and more dynamic. Now, at the top of the page, you can find easy ways to contact us, log in to the site, get at all your account info, and view your order history. Search is where it’s at, so we’ve prominently featured a huge search box at the top of every page. Search away! We’ve highlighted our top sellers right in the header of the page. As we always say, if other people love an item, well, it’s worth taking a look at. All your shopping categories are easily accessible in the left column of every page. Navigate around – we’re certain you’ll find some great green products you’ll love. At the bottom of the page, you can still follow us all over the web, easily navigate throughout the site, and visit our blog (which has a new address: http://blog.bgreenlifestyle.com).
We’re really excited about these changes. We think it’s makes shopping with bGreen a much better experience.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out more features, like a featured brands section, some top search info, and a blog re-design to match the new site, so be sure to check back often.
Oh, and we almost forgot to mention something. As a “thanks for being patient while we crippled our site for a few days preventing you from shopping” we’re offering you 20% off your order using code RELAUNCH at checkout. This coupon is good through next Monday, Feb 15.
2009 bGreen Year in Review
Thursday, December 31st, 2009Back when we were young whippersnapeprs spending summers in Brookline, NH, Barry used to do a Week in Review for all the staff. Well, it seems fitting that we do a quick Year in Review for bGreen. Without further adieu…
- Just under a year ago bGreen was nothing more than a figment of our imagination. Over a few beers and a few burgers, we hatched the idea for a company made it easy to go green.
- We actually had a name before the company even existed. bGreen. Be Green. Barry GREENstein. It seemed to work. Now we just had to build a business around what we thought to be a clever name.
- Again, before the company even existed, we took a trip to LA to see what the green movement was like out there. It really blew us away, we met a ton of cool people, like the guys from The Green Hive and The Green Life. Aside from making us totally pissed about living in Boston and not California, the trip made us shift gears and come up with the bGreen online store.
- In June, we hired a team of lawyers from the VC Ready Law Group to hammer out our business details. What they (and we) thought we be a straight forward agreement turned into a month long ordeal. I think it worked out well for everyone.
- In July, we officially became bGreen Group LLC. We had our funding in place, our legal details hammered out, and now we just had to do something.
- We spent the next several months developing a website, developing an online store, scrapping a business plan or two, tweeting our little hearts out, and trying to spread the word about bGreen. We learned some valuable lessons during this time, and make our fair share of mistakes. But as the great Bob Ross used to say, “We don’t make mistakes, we just have happy accidents.”
- The Fall months brought us quite a bit of good times. We launched our website, lined up all our inventory, launched our online store, made our first sales (thanks moms!), networked like crazy, had a few people tell us our idea was lousy, and had a few more people tell us our idea was awesome. We’re leaning towards the awesome side.
- We took a trip to Arizona in Novemeber to attend GreenBuild. Again, we met a bunch of people, saw that there’s really something behind the green movement, and solidified our plans for moving bGreen to the next level.
- December’s been interesting. We launched the bGreen Weekly Deal. Each week we’re selling one green & eco friendly product at a deep discount, with the hope of helping people go green quickly. We love the models setup by companies like Woot and Steep & Cheap, so we figured why not have a green one of those.
- But the biggest thing December brought us was our entry into 2010. We have the most exciting aspect of bGreen in place. In the tech and VC world there’s a term a lot of people use for crazy new stuff. Disruptive. Changing the way people thing about certain things and changing the way we do business. We think the next phase of bGreen is disruptive, and we look forward to sharing that with you in the near future.
Thanks for all your support, Happy New Year, and we wish you continued success in 2010.
-Barry & Lee


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