The whole review thing…

Posted on 23 Nov 2009 | 0 comments

There’s been not-a-little discussion on the whole review thing around the Mummy Blogging community recently. Now, of course, things are slightly different for us: we are, in fact, a business, and a commercial enterprise. Lovely people though we are, we do actually get paid moolah (small bits of) to feature people on our site (well, 10,000 people visit us every month, so we have to show them something.)

BUT.

(note that it was quite a big ‘but’…)

Wa-a-a-y way back – a few years ago – when we began doing reviews, we decided we needed ground rules. Any product we reviewed HAD to be used. Properly. And that meant in our own families, lived with, driven with, washed and tumbled, dribbled on or wee-ed in – whatever it took to make sure it did what it said it would.

That way we not only admired it from afar, but we also got to know all about its good bits, its bad bits, its quirky bits and its inadvertant hey-its-fab-at-that-too bits.

We have no intention of reviewing every pushchair on the planet to say which is best – we are not interested in comparisons, just in whether one product does its job well for one family. If we like the look of a product, we’ll agree to try it. If we use it and still like it – we’ll say so.  If we don’t – well, we used to run it past the company and ask if they still want it published. These days, we put the good ones on the site – but the duff ones (which are so much more fun to write) stay here on the blog, under the ‘secret reviews’ category.  There’s not many so far, but more will come…

So. there y’go. That’s what we do with our reviews. And anyone who reads one should be able to see that a) we really have seen the product, b) we really have used it over a decent length of time and c) we’re saying what we really think. To be fair, never yet has a PR ever tried to tell us what to say… Oh, how I wish one would try!