New Discount School Supply Website!

I’m Peter Walter, Director of Web Marketing for Discount School Supply.

I am very happy to announce that our redesigned DiscountSchoolSupply.com website has just been launched and is now available to all of our customers!


As we worked toward our launch date, we took gradual steps to be sure the site worked as well as we could possibly make it. Beginning in December 2009, we made the new site available to a limited test group of visitors, asking them to provide comments. Their valuable observations and suggestions were instrumental in helping us to further perfect your shopping experience for discount school supplies on the web.
Now we’re excited to invite all of you to go and judge the results for yourself at Discount School Supply.com. In the coming weeks, we will be adding posts to this blog highlighting some of the most important updates to the new Discount School Supply website from the people who helped build it. We want to help you discover new ways to save time and money when you purchase construction paper, Colorations® paint, or any one of the thousands of supplies we offer for your child care center or preschool.

Many early childhood professionals as well as parents of young children have shared positive feedback for our new site. We would really like to hear from you, too!

Please visit our new website Discount School Supply.com and answer our short, five- question survey.
Thanks for reading!
- Peter

Twitter Fail

Hi! I’m Laurel Johnston, Brand Marketing Manager at Discount School Supply (DSS). I get to do all kinds of fun and exciting things here at DSS, from working on ad campaigns to attending large trade shows, writing Web content, overseeing many of our social media efforts and beyond! One of my favorite social media tools is Twitter. However, we’re experiencing some technical difficulties with Twitter right now and I wanted to be sure you were aware.

As head of the “tweet team” here at DSS, I’m often happily tweeting on behalf of DSS right from my cube here in Monterey as we go about our exciting work in Marketing. I love to share special offers, discuss new products and converse with the hard-working moms, teachers and other “tweeps” who follow DSS. This is why I’m so sad to inform you that recently our Twitter account was hacked, and we’ve been unable to solve the problem. Without account access, we are unable to log in and thus unable to reply to our followers’ Tweets and other mentions of DSS in the Twittersphere. I apologize to those of you who may have been waiting on a reply or may have tweeted about DSS and heard nothing. More importantly, if any direct messages or tweets have gone out from our account since Feb 1st, it’s important you know they’re not from us.

We’ve submitted numerous support requests with Twitter, all to no avail. Twitter Support continues to send us auto-reply messages with the same basic steps to follow—none of them working for us since the account settings have been hacked. It’s frustrating and disappointing, but we won’t give up. We love tweeting with our tweeps and I assure you we are doing what we can to get the issue fixed. (I’m not above driving to Twitter headquarters to find a human to help… Seriously!) We hope to be tweeting again soon from @School_Supplies, but in the meantime, if you need to reach us for any reason, feel free to call 1-800-627-2829. And, well, there’s always Facebook!

2/24/10 Update:
Our Twitter account (@School_Supplies) is now fixed! We are happily tweeting once again with our tweeps, and a big thank you goes out to “tiger” at Twitter for all of his or her help in getting our account back up and running. Whew!

Celebrating Valentine's Day at Discount School Supply

Hi. I’m Judy McGuinn with Discount School Supply. This Circle Time blog is written by the staff at Discount to try to give you a little insight into the way we work together and how we feel about what we do. This post is a special insight about our company.

We have an employee group called the Employee Communications Forum (ECF). It’s made up of elected representatives from each department, and I’m the sponsor.

We’re in the middle of our Valentine’s Day celebration, and I’d like to tell you about it. You probably know that Discount School Supply is the leader in arts & crafts supplies for the early childhood market. So if there’s one thing we have plenty of here, it’s arts & crafts supplies. Last week, the ECF organized a Valentine Craft Day. The project of the day was for everyone to make a Valentine Mail Box. Did you ever make one of those in elementary school? I did – I made it from a shoe box and covered it with doilies. Anyhow, we had a veritable smorgasbord of materials to decorate our individual Valentine Mail Boxes. We ordered enough “blanks” for everyone, and they all went!

Each person puts his Valentine Mail Box in his cube or his office. And for the week of 2/8-2/12, staff members can “mail” Valentines to one another through a special ECF delivery service we run this week only. You may think that adults in the work place would be uninterested in receiving Valentines from their co-workers. But not here! Last year, we did this for the first time, and as the week progressed, the “mail” turned into an avalanche of Valentines. People who didn’t expect to get one got lots. People took the time to reach out to one another with handmade Valentines, candy hearts and, yes, plenty of doilies. It was honestly one of the nicest experiences I have ever had, and the feedback the ECF received indicated that most of us felt the same. Not only do we spend our days making and distributing great products for children, occasionally we don’t mind acting like them. We wish you all a very happy, heartwarming Valentine’s Day.

Here is an assortment of some of the materials Discount School Supply staff used for Valentine's Day Crafting!