Salty Revolution actually has a 2nd version of it’s online store, this is MAN BUY!

MAN BUY is a tongue and cheek satirical store based on typical male stereotypes. However, despite all the ridiculous elements (such as the “Chuck-Norris-O-Meter” designed to check your manliness), it is actually a fully functioning web store. It’s simpler and easier to use and around half of all our customers use it instead of our main shop pages!
Give it a try.

What is MAN BUY?

A few week’s ago I was chatting to one of our regular customers Adam, and whilst it seemed he like some of the many new features on the website over the last 6 months, he said that there are now so many things going on with stuff you can click all over the place that it did make it more difficult sometimes to find what you want, and sometimes made the website slow to load, especially on a mobile signal.

So I gave this some thought, and spoke to a few more regulars and quite a few of you guys said similar things. That whilst it was nice to see some of the new content, if you just wanted to quickly hop online and look at, or maybe buy a few things, it was slower and took longer than before. This seemed to be quite a commonly held view, especially from the men.

It began with Adam

So what started as just a chat with Adam, snowballed into conversations with more and more of you. With the website now being over 1,600 pages in all, and over 6,000 photos, and animations, trying to make all of this available, without having many layers upon layers of sub menus would be difficult.

It quickly became apparent that many of you also like all the extra content on the website that we’ve added over the past 12 months, so we didn’t want to prune away lots of content and graphics, that many of you enjoy, and also took us a lot of work to put in place. After chatting to a few more of you it became clear very quickly that people were divided into 2 camps. Around a third of you read nearly everything we publish, our articles, new arrivals, etc. With the other two thirds of you sometimes reading some of that, but, 9 times out of 10 you just wanted to quickly nip online and check availability on stock, prices, or some information on a specific species. All the extra content made this slower than before to load on a phone, and it took longer to find what you wanted.

It takes two to Tango!

Rather than trying to make the website into a hybrid kind of Jack of all trades, the logical solution was to solve the needs of both groups by having in effect two websites.

Website 1 - The current Salty Revolution website with fancier graphics, articles, bigger photos etc, for those wanting to pass their time casually browsing the information and stock. The equivalent of a meandering drive in a big comfy saloon car.

Website 2 - Whereas website 2 would be a more like a stripped out track car. As close to the basic bare bones chassis as possible. It needed to be as easy to use, and fast to load as possible.

Working for the man!

So Adam and others wanted the kind of shop you can run into, quickly find what you want, pay, leave, and be in and out as fast as possible. Like the stereotype of man style shopping. It is true a lot of men hate shopping and browsing for stuff. Well if what we needed was a shop for man shopping, then let’s go with that idea, and take it far too far!

If we’re aiming to create a shop for fast and easy man style shopping, then let’s go to town with that and for fun create it an over the top way as a store for blokes!

What do men want?

Well as it seemed to be virtually only the men requesting this let’s make it look like it’s only for men. So this is what we wanted:

• A super basic, super fast, track day style brutally functional store.

• Decorate it in a minimal style with bloke type decor. So I set about making a list of things men use, or collect, or want to be. So we had as concepts; wrestling bears, James bond style stunts, and the almost universal heroes of men like mighty ChucK Norris at the top, all the way down to Geoff that had that really cool stamp collection we all envy. We needed fire, and explosions, and jam jars with odd screws in, flamethrowers, tough lumberjacks, Pac Man games, Scalextrix, assault rifles, Spitfires, hedge trimmers, etc. With a digital Chuck Norris as it’s overseer, in a colour scheme the A-team would approve of!

• But how to market it, and make sure all the guys knew that this new store was created to suit their supermarket sweep style of man shopping. Well of course the best way to show all the men we’d built what men wanted (or at least what most men mostly wanted) the best way to do this was, in a slightly tongue in cheek manner, to imply it was so manly and man shopping based that we’d even have a screening process so only the very most manly of men can use it. But who was fit to judge how manly they are? Well Chuck Norris seemed the obvious choice as few men could really claim to be more manly than him!

And so MAN BUY was born, and the much feared MAN TEST!

And so from Adam casually saying the website was a bit slow, it has spiralled out of control into an almost surreal world. The kind of world where a man could one minute be shooting down a fictional helicopter whilst dangling from a rope, to, mere seconds later be organising metaphorical screws into imaginary jars.

OK, erm bit weird!

Yeah a bit, but, I’m sure it’s no great secret that so am I, and you know what the world needs more fun, so why not create it!

So can I use MAN BUY?

Yes you can, and yes you should! If you want to quickly snap up a bargain or one off item, or just dip in to see what we have in stock then use MAN BUY! It’s much mush faster to load than the main website, it has all the same stock and offers, and shares the same shopping basket, account logins, and everything else just like the main site. If you’re on mobile it’ll also be much faster. Most of the pages on MAN BUY let you have 6 to 9 products on screen at a time compared to mostly only 1 to 4 at a time on the main site. So yes, use it, love it, and every time you do so you can feel that warm glow of being that bear wrestling, bad guy defeating, stamp collector, from the land where the badass are born.

So now you have effectively two different versions of the same shop, are you planning any more?

Most definitely. I have 3 other ideas I’m considering. I’ll no doubt do at least one of these, and maybe even all 3. They are:

• One for kids. So I’m considering adding a Pirate themed one, as most kids like pirates, and it ties in with the tropical island saltwater theme of the shop. The basic idea is a landing page that has links to activities and little competitions for kids with pirate themed prizes. Little mini documentaries on animals kids particularly like, such as Seahorses etc. Stock updates on things kids most often want to buy, or you get for them, like the Seashells, hermit crabs, maybe some Pirate themed merch etc.

• One all about the aesthetic. So I’d divide the shop into 15 sections, based not on species, but by colours. So for example you can go to the red page and see all the: red fish, red inverts, red corals, even red shells, all in a beautifully laid out red themed set of pages. There will be care information on the species of course, but also a strong focus on design in terms of scaping, stocking, and theming the tank so it fits in with the rest of your room at home.

• One for beginners. So it would have a large help section, with articles and info on setting up, etc. But, organised in a structured way, like a college course would be. So we’d divide it up into chapters like a school workbook ish. So we teach you the basic principles, the you move onto the pages for setting up, then the stocking advice with only the beginner starter fish etc, and then as you proceed through the chapters at your own pace you can slowly learn all the most important principles of the hobby, and most importantly of all in the right order. So starting from being inspired and considering keeping marines, all the way through to breeding marine fish, or establishing your own independent shop etc.

We’ll keep you posted on all of these, and if you could let me know what you think of these three ideas, which one you think we should do next, any other ideas for different web shop styles etc, it’s all very gratefully received. You can email me directly at jamesgoodchild@live.com

Many thanks everyone, and make sure you check out this link to see the truly crazy world of MAN TEST and MAN BUY in all it’s ridiculous glory!

James Goodchild, 17th July 2021.