Sunday, September 6, 2009

Stampin' Up Changes

A lot of you may already know about the announcement Stampin' Up made last week. It was a rather startling, though not entirely unexpected, announcement: SU! demos are no longer able to blog, twitter, email, or facebook in a promotional way for another company that sells competing products. I am saddened that many who do both SU! and design team work now have to make what is a very hard decision. There has been so much speculation floating around for the past few days, partly due to the fact that SU! was not perfectly clear as to what they meant and people panicked. I have heard some people say they would never buy from SU! again or wouldn't sign up now, though they had been thinking about it. The amount of misinformation that is floating out there, some of it sadly spread by some of our own demonstrators, has already damaged SU!'s reputation.
Stampin' Up has a offered a webinar on their site for us to understand the changes. They said that we can link to our friends blogs, we can link up to sites like Splitcoaststampers, Stampin' Addicts, and Craft Critique!; we can link anywhere that does NOT sell competitive products and have a shopping cart or Buy Now button on the site. We can even design for other companies, we just can't blog about it. We can't link up to places that actually sell on their site. When you post a project using other companies stamps, or supplies, there are particular rules that apply. SU! encourages it's demos not to be too specific about who the manufacturer is, what the price was, and where you bought it.
I am saddened that many SU demonstrators are now wrestling with a hard decision, especially the ones who design for other companies. Right now, I will be signing the contract and staying with SU. I love the product .... what can I say? I love the matching inks, card stock, ribbon, etc.! I am a little upset that this has happened. I feel like my blog should be MY blog and I should be allowed to say what I want to. Probably the only changes you will notice on here is I won't link to other stores where I teach classes or buy items. Other than that, things should stay the same.
I hope you will continue to support me and order SU items from me. If you want to know specifics about non-SU items that I post, please leave me a comment or e-mail me.

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