About us - by Chris Trim

First Term

Blazered was conceived by my wife Kate in May 2004. Kate had spent an irritating morning trying to create some more storage space in the cubby hole under the stairs at home in Portsmouth, Hampshire. Surrounded by boxes of our three children's cast offs she identified a great deal of outgrown school uniform. After two phone calls she discovered that our son's school no longer operates a used uniform shop and that our daughter's school runs a second-hand shop on one day a term. With our third child due to start school that September, Kate headed off to the special one day sale at the girl's school with hopes of kitting out our four year old and trading in any cast-offs. On her return she declared that the whole experience had been unbelievably frustrating.. Pricing and sizing was adhoc and the wonderful volunteers trying to run the whole thing seemed hobbled by the lengthy process of trying to manually log all items for sale and search for listed items in a large ledger book.

I have been designing websites and developing dynamic database driven solutions for clients professionally and it did not come as such a surprise when Kate started to nag me to develop a web site for busy mum's with bags of outgrown uniform or growing kids needing tons of kit.

Having canvassed friends, relations and other parents from the local uniformed schools, I decided to go for it - cleared my desk and started researching schools, uniform policies, sizing, LEAS and more... We chose the name Blazered, the distinctive name tape logo and I started coding in my small office at home. Interrupted by school holidays, demanding children, a new kitten, nativity plays, in-laws' extended Xmas visit and our great friends who have endured dinners at our house around the computer so that I can continue to work whilst entertaining, we are finally ready to launch - March 2005.

I have designed the site so as to be easy to use. If you would like to see any changes or additions to the site, please feel free to contact me.  I have been under pressure to get the site live before the Easter holidays so I have sacrificed some functionality which I will implement shortly.

We hope that you benefit from using the site.

Chris & Kate