Hello, my dears!

Reporting in following my (all too) brief soujourn in Shropshire. Mr. Stevenson and I enjoyed several days of visits to vintage selling establishments throughout that fine county, calling in at several in Shrewsbury, and following part of the South Shropshire Vintage Trail.

My favourite of all the shops visited is undoubtedly Bertie’s in Craven Arms. It’s full of truly beautiful 1930s and 1940s clothing and some absolutely amazing hats. I must admit, I was naughty and did ignore the slightly eye-watering price tag on a gorgeous umbrella with a celluloid handle of cream roses. Look out for it in upcoming Ritz shoots!

Speaking of upcoming Ritz shoots, the glorious sunshine that graced my little holiday has utterly disappeared and our planned photographic excursions to capture our new garments have been delayed by the grey skies, rainy weather and chilly temperatures. Waiting to be photographed are our new Man about Town suit, the Parisienne bolero suit first debuted last year, and two new 1930s dresses, the Socialite and the two-piece Heiress. We also have a new limited edition blouse on its way, and some gorgeous ivory linen trousers for the ladies. I’m currently crossing everything I own in the hopes that the coming weekend may bring some sunny weather our way!

In the mean time, I thought I’d let you have a little peek at the Heiress two-piece 1930s dress. Just a little peek, mind, I don’t want to give it all away!

Why yes, that is the neckline! Yes, it does have a bow! No, you can’t see more yet until it has been Officially Immortalised by Camera.

Hello there!

It has been far too long since I had the opportunity to let some cats out of the bag around here, and if you’ve been waiting for us to get on with something new, your wait is very nearly over.

If you’re a chap, you’ll soon notice a rather large change of our Gentswear section. We are, sadly, almost totally out of the lovely brown fleck tweed used for our 2:30 at Worcester suit, and since the green wool twill used for the Bounder has long since disappeared into customers’ wardrobes, we have decided to totally remove both the Bounder suit and the 2:30 at Worcester. Waiting in the wings to replace them is our new gents’ suit, the Man about Town, and we’re also planning a new country suit as well as a summer suit in truly gorgeous ivory linen.

For our ladies, we have several new garments ready and waiting to be photographed; there’s the Parisienne bolero suit, which I’m very taken with myself, two brand new 1930s dresses, and some linen trousers for all your nautical dressing needs. Still in the pipeline, but very near the end, is our long-awaited Garden Party dress, which will finally be available as soon as the weather permits the modelling of dotted swiss outside!

The rest of our news is not about new garments, but concerns Yours truly going off on a well-deserved break next week. Whilst I relax in front of a roaring fire with a murder mystery, and go off on sojourns to vintage selling emporiums (try not to be envious), I shall still be answering your emails and dealing with your orders, although via the mysterious medium of modern telephone technology. If your email reply takes a little longer than usual, or if it turns up in your inbox looking rather odd, please do be patient and remember I am depending on the whim of the satellite gods and whatnot.

Pip pip!

Hello folks!

Not an exciting update I’m afraid, but we just wanted to give you a little news about how we’ll be dealing with new orders from now on.

From now on. we’ll be scrapping our standard order acknowledgement email that automatically went out to you when you ordered a garment. From now on, we’ll be sending personally written order acknowledgements, as this gives us a chance to go over your order details and ask any questions necessary. We’ll also be asking you to double check your measurements for us when we send these emails – not very exciting, but should help to eliminate any mistakes or typos in the measurements from the very beginning!

This means that you won’t receive an order acknowledgement if you order outside of working hours or over the weekend, but we will get back to you as soon as we can.

Greetings, all! We hope you all had a wonderful holiday period, and aren’t too disappointed to return to work on this cold, windy January day!

Firstly, I must apologise for the dearth of activity on this poor neglected blog of late! Can you believe the last time we posted was back in September?! How naughty we are! In truth, there has been little news to impart to you, lovely readers, over the past few months. We have been so busy with taking care of orders, we haven’t had the opportunity for blogging, or indeed to crack on with our new garments.

If you’ve read some of our older blog posts, you’ll know that POTR consists of four members of one family; we do all of the making of your garments ourselves with our very own hands, and because of this there will always be limits on the amount of work we can take on. If you’ve read our Behind the Scenes posts, you’ll know just how time consuming making our new garments can be. In our early days, our updates would be large, well over ten garments at a time, and now POTR is a little bigger, this is just something we cannot find the time to do.

Instead of the large seasonal updates, we intend to add a small number of new garments gradually. You can expect to see new Ritz offerings every month or two. This way, we can keep offering you new and exciting lovelies to wear, and keep our current six week turnaround time for orders. Hurrah!

Speaking of new and exciting lovelies, we still have several new garments coming from our horribly delayed autumn and winter designs. There are two new dresses, both long-sleeved for colder days, that I’m very much looking forward to, and a rather exciting gent’s suit, this time for town wear.

More news soon!
Ta ta for now!

Firstly, thank you to everyone who entered, and thank you also for all of your lovely comments and birthday wishes! A huge welcome to all of the new people who found their way to us; it was great to see your comments alongside those of our lovely customers! Thank you all for helping to make the very first Puttin’ on the Ritz giveaway so successful and exciting!

And now, without further ado, we shall announce our winner! Drum roll, please…

Our winner is the writer of comment #63 which is Sara! Congratulations! An email is on its way to you to request your mailing details, and your Lady Swinburn stole will be on its way to you very soon!

Our commiserations to all who didn’t win, and our thanks again for taking part. This won’t be the last competition at Puttin’ on the Ritz, so do make sure to try again next time.