history, philosophy, propaganda...
"At Clarity, our cups are neither half full nor half empty. The cup has twice the required capacity."
To be on the Safe Side... This page is written as a personal opinion article by JD - The founder and still to this day the Supreme Dictator. If you find any of this offensive or unprofessional, well gee - that really is a tough break. You're free to close the window at any time.
Tea Break Alert! A refreshing beverage might be called for while you read this lot...
For all our posturing and jolly statements about how much we love your cash, and how you should be begging us to let you buy your wares here, there's a very real little business behind the light-hearted facade. If we're to succeed in our plans to take over the world and enjoy a comfortably wealthy retirement, it's going to need an army of happy customers. So we need you to be happy with the whole Clarity experience. We need you to tell your friends and associates our website address, and we need you to feel that we're worthy enough for you to recommend. Most importantly, we need you to come back to us in the future and buy from us again.
We've got lots of really great customers these days, many of whom can now be counted as actual friends. It's honestly very warming when people thank us for good products, excellent services, or just for making them chuckle.
And when somebody says "A friend told me about you guys and said you were good, so here I am" - Stuff like that makes it worth getting out of bed in the morning. Oh, and the money. 
Whether you're already a client or not (yet!) - if you've got a couple of spare minutes, let us know what you think of our website, our presentation, even our broken links or mistakes. Praise or Whinge, all are welcomed and read by the Hierarchy. Just a regular old email is perfect, none of this filling-in-a-form-on-a-web-page nonsense. (I'm sure I'm not alone in my contempt for those pesky web "contact" forms - half the time they don't work {which you only find out AFTER you've type a page of stuff into it}, half the time they never get answered, and yet another half the time it's a bloody annoyance that you don't get any record of what you've mailed - obviously designed by boffins who can't grasp the concept of User Experience...)
We get asked about the website fairly often, so here's the site credits if you're really nosey. Bottom line, it's a simple home-job, but it does the trick. Fast loading, no crappy Flash Intros (Does this mean anything to you too? "Skip Intro! Skip Intro! Just show me the ****ing site dammit!") 
In the beginning...
Want some history? Clarity coalesced from the ether back in 1998. In its original incarnation, it was given form by a disillusioned employee of DX Communications who felt the moral and professional standards of his co-workers were often a little lacking, (what kind of "impartial advice" depends on which network is paying the highest commissions for that month...?), who found himself working surrounded by thieves (provable and documented should anyone feel like chancing a lawsuit, hehe!) and who reckoned he could do the same thing on his own but with better products, prices, personality, and of course some actual honesty and decent moral values.
Right from the outset, Corporate Bollocks has been forbidden here. No redefining our paradigms to leverage synergistically focussed values in a solution driven, dynamically evolving arena for us, no sir! For a small time-out read at some truly classic Corporate Bollocks, peruse this.
Clarity is a small business born of fun and personal interests. It exists, and always has, purely as an enjoyable way for those whom it pays to earn a living, and that's how it will stay unless it's bought out by some bigger company, providing an instant comfortable retirement for all involved.
IF we were established in the 1950's we'd be able to show you a library photograph of founder and Chairman Emeritus, Doctor Clarence Touche illustrating the underlying purpose, mission and philosophy behind the Clarity organisation. |
Evolving
The offhand style of much of this site is itself an evolution from people's ongoing reactions to it. We're well aware that the odd person might think it unprofessional, but to be blunt, sod them. You hear me?
The sheer volume of pleasant and complimentary mails and comments we get illustrating how people like dealing with our style and atitude is more than enough to prove it's a Good Thing. You can't please all of the people all of the time, They say. Well, so be it. So we choose to please the people who can have a smile. For those people, we'll go several extra miles. For the rest - well, we'll manage to get by without their money,and we hope the door doesn't hit their arses on their way out of this site. 
Sticking with "evolution," the last couple of years saw a giant shift in the core mail-order business of this website, away from mobiles, which sadly were becoming ever more tedious and ever less profitable. You can thank Asda and Cellnet for that if you recall your cellular phone market history... On a hunch, we dabbled with selling some parts and equipment used by our own telecom/network
installer partners in the field, and the take-up on broadband internet gear was surprisingly encouraging so we moved things fairly quickly in that direction ourselves. What really triggered the final complete direction change was our landmark acquisition of BT's ADSL adaptor in early 2002 - until then it was a bespoke BT part never made available for sale publicly and only ever supplied within BT's own private internal logistics machine to BT's own engineers for installing ADSL. Yep, it was us, thanks to Clarity and Clarity alone, you can now buy what was an impossible-to-get product. I'm so proud of that little chestnut!
Beards were specially grown so that they could be stroked in contemplation. The BT corporate equipment supply channel was duly snooped, researched, and finally found out - then the actual manufacturing company who had the BT contract to make them was plead with and begged to allow us to sell them. Things have come along nicely since then, but there's also been frustrations too, for a small operation lacking vast corporate capital to throw at manufacturers. See HERE
for a humourous and enlightening read about that - beware, there's swearwords and bitterness...
This wasn't the first time an additional kind of product has been successfully dabbled with over the years, although not to the same degree or with the same powerful results as ADSL installation hardware; A couple of years ago, it was noticed that the vast majority of the people who bought from us were professionals, techies, or student types, and that the whole Sense Of Humour thing seemed to be a common bond. Good humour, creative minds, disposable income... hmm... In short, people of a like mind. We started to dabble in some products which we got a feeling would be compatible with a significant proportion of the clientel we attracted, and sure enough products like the Driving "aids" and our BB guns have done alarmingly well. Not so much with the girls strangely... We'll have to see what we can do about that then...
Honesty, Integrity, and Other Buzzwords...
For all that we like to try new things that might appeal to the kind of people who trade with us, we only sell products which we actually believe are good. If it's on this website, that's as good an indication as any that it's not crap. And if there's ever an item we feel is still worth carrying but which isn't top-class, we're not afraid to say so either. Neither do we let profit come before good advice. Honest, guvnor. Hey, it might sound corny, but real world experience has definitely convinced us that if we lose out on a sale because we gave the correct advice which excluded our own products, the punter remembers that honesty and help, and we'll see them again some time in the future. And probably some of their friends too.
Marketing
A vast chunk of our business comes from existing customers, and people to whom they've recommended us. In our first whole year of trading, we used no advertising whatsoever, and still use very, very little. Yet still the business is stable and growing. Surely that's good.
So word-of-mouth and referrals from customer to customer provide most of our new recruits to the Clarity Legions. The great thing about that kind of business is that the advertising is free, and the new customer is more confident and relaxed with us in the knowledge that their friends have already tried us out and liked us. We want every customer to recommend us to their friends, family, and colleagues. At this point, let me just remind you of the snappy website address again - it's www.clarity.it.
Perhaps you'd write it on the back of your hand so you remember to mention it to all and sundry? Thanks.
We despise spam e-mail (the Scourge Of The Net) and if you're ordering from us you'll notice the absence of a "we may pass your details to trusted companies who may have goods or services of interest to you" tickbox - because you're OURS, and OURS alone. I would further elaborate thusly; "They'll have to wrench my customer database from my cold, dead hands!"
Indeed, there's a thing on the ordering page that asks for permission to keep your e-mail address on file so we can e-mail you about any wonderous new developments, and it also says such mails will be few and far between. It's true, there hasn't been one in over six months. You'll only hear from us if it's significantly worth mentioning.
 A Clarity henchperson processes a letter containing negative comments via the "Whinge-Gone 9000" Customer Feedback Analyzer. This customer can be sure their feedback has been given the attention it deserved. |
We listen to everybody.
Feedback is always welcome, whether as comments during ordering, or direct emails. We don't ask for comments because it's "the done thing" like so many others do - every last comment is read by the people who need to read them, not a processing droid. Most will also get a human reply. The proof has already been in the eating of the pudding so to speak, because Clarity's current business form has evolved over the years based on client comments and suggestions as well as our own formidably brilliant creativity. And not being a huge faceless corporate, you can be sure that all comments are read by the Hierarchy, usually to the accompaniment of coffees and cakes in the War Room.
Real Customer Service
We practice Real Customer Service. We're thinking about registering a trademark for that. Real Customer Service means common sense, respectful, realistic business and total fairness for everyone, including us. If a client has a problem, we're more than happy to help as best we can, and usually manage to go well beyond expectations.
But the door swings both ways around here. We've been known to decline to trade with stroppy, arrogant or rude people, because we CAN.
If somebody obviously breaks something and tries to claim it was faulty, they can sing for it. We're nobody's fool. Just because you can get away with it elsewhere, don't expect it here. Every penny comes out of somebody's pocket in a business this size, and it's probably going to be mine.
Business Practices
Every business should consider using operational practices which make sure that people are held accountable for their individual failures when they happen, to see that the individual responsible is told what a clown they are right to their face for shaming their company in the eyes of the customer, and to see that the said errant employee is made to buy the Round Of Shame at the pub or similar.
Why, just last week I was appointed Coffee Bitch for the remainder of the week, (circumventing the traditional squabbles over Whose Turn It Is) as a tangible penalty for a miserable Faux Pas of mine that resulted in a guy's package not being sent out as promised.
Anyway, enough about us...
Talk to us! Email your
comments now!
E-mail addresses are here.
Flattery and praise are revelled in, criticism and insults cause
pouty lips and frowns, but are nonetheless digested to see if we
couldn't maybe change something to stop it from happening again.
And don't worry, we won't publish your writings anywhere, although
we DO reserve the right to print out your email privately, scrunch
it into a ball and play some kind of Throwing A Ball Of Paper Around
game with it.