Tag Archives: foxy lady

women drivers

Meet FOXY Lady Sophie

It’s been a mad few days but we finally have our new look website and barring nothing unforeseen everything seems to be working well in terms of the membership sign up systems and so on.

Meet FOXY Lady Sophie on our right.

Through a series of different introductions I’d met Jo at Pixie Doodle whose artistic talents were just what I was looking for to bring the FOXY brand (female, shrewd, canny and discerning) to life. But it wasn’t a straightforward brief and we started with the fox… but there is a limit to the situations where a pretty fox might be appropriate or sufficiently memorable in a motoring context.

So we then changed direction and concentrated on the FOXY Lady herself with all the potential she has to offer us in future. I am very pleased with the end result and hope it hits the spot for our lady drivers too.

The website was then built for us by Streets Ahead, a specialist website and internet consultancy on the South Coast. We have worked with Graham and Liz here for 7 years now and we couldn’t ask for a more professional, flexible, tolerant and supportive business partner here.

The plan had been to link the new look launch with the Club becoming a not for profit organisation. But this has taken much longer than we appreciated and it isn’t all tidied up yet. Actually FOXY Lady Drivers Club Limited was incorporated as a private/limited by guarantee/no shares business on 24 April but it’ll be a while before we have the bank account and VAT registration we need before we can formally move the Club from its present company status.

The whole point of doing this is to attract sponsors so we can help more women drivers with their motoring, knowing that women are bearing the brunt of much hardship. We can then continue to do what we do whilst charging a one-off and low lifetime subscription rate of just £23 (for services she can share with her family too). Ar present, the Club is funded by FOXY Choice, we take no salaries from it, and we think that it’s only right and proper that the motor industry should pay to raise its image in the minds of female motorists in future.

Who better to do this for women drivers and the motor industry than an independent and female industry outsider like FOXY Lady Drivers Club. Using Sophie as our spokesperson in future!

Anyway, more about that later.

In the meantime you can see FOXY Lady Sophie in person at the Club website, please like her at our Facebook page of course and she’ll be increasingly more evident in this FOXY Lady blog of course.

FOXY

female friendly, women

The Lady Magazine gets foxy

I loved the article in the Telegraph this weekend about The Lady Magazine getting an online makeover.

When FOXY Lady Drivers Club was in its infancy we ran a competition for The Lady readers having been encouraged by their Media Pack that their audience was largely in the South East, wealthy and an average age of 60-ish. That profile ticked a lot of boxes for us but our ‘How to survive the garage experience’ promotion didn’t work because the charming ladies that contacted us as a result were not at all web-friendly and our business runs by email and via a passworded members area of our website. So it was a misfit and whilst we probably did raise awareness of our business name we didn’t recruit many members.

I now read that the average age of their readership is in fact 76 which makes more sense, given our feedback, and that when asked about email in a survey some respondents thought this came through their letterbox.

Now the article was having some harmless fun about what is for many females a trusted institution. Like the WI before them they are now having to look for tomorrow’s subscribers and therein lies the challenge; to grow its readership back to the good old days…

And until Magazines are banished altogether in favour of websites (unlikely I’d say) the economic reality is that it is cheaper, easier, more immediate and more efficient to deliver information and support services online. I know because we wrestled with this dilemma and tried to do both until last year. And sadly we lost some members who were unable to do online and were deeply disappointed that we could not afford to give them that choice.

But perhaps The Lady magazine can combine the two more effectively because of its female friendly brand and heritage. Where else would you look for a nanny, butler or chauffeur…

It needs a very clever marketer to get this right but the age profile is perfect (50+ is the market now), SAGA is doing very nicely thank you and they can probably bump up their advertising rates to support them as they grow.

Good luck anyway – we foxy ladies should support each other!