Petit Bourgeois

ASICS Germany has launched, and I'm very proud of the team for this one, which had all sorts of idiosyncratic problems, and a track record of being troublesome. So a big shoutout to Holger and Mairéad in Amsterdam, and to Doris in Neuss, keep up the good work.

But this time, I've got some extra news. It's been over 2 months since we launched the UK, and we're starting to have representative traffic stats for the new sites.

The results are very encouraging:

• with (unfortunately) no particular extra marketing effort, traffic is up more than 40%: doing the Right Thing does help, event just on its own (though of course it'd be better to have a complete marketing plan around it)
• visitors who go through the new "knowledge" section spend more than twice as much time on the site than the average
• the new Onitsuka Tiger site draws 4 times as many visits as before the relaunch, and I can't wait for the next upgrades

There are still many mountains to climb (we barely started twittering, the sections about Athletes and Events is not yet up, our email newsletters are a mess, and we're not quite fluent in the editorial maintenance of the site despite the launch of really great articles), but I feel overall we're doing pretty good.