History of Toffsworld

Toffsworld was founded by Dawn and Peter Toner in 1999. At the time, Dawn was a part-time database developer and Peter was a marketing consultant to several leading UK brand names.

However, what started out as a quirky project by name and nature soon became a self funding business.

Within months of its launch, Toffsworld was described by The Sunday Times as the, ‘Leading Luxury Portal in the World’ and within a year, Peter had been retained by Harrods of London to design and build Harrods.com.

Toffsworld has always been profitable. In an age of dotcom booms, busts and credit crunches, this is a situation we’re proud of.

Toffsworld now provides employment for dozens of full-time and part-time workers, including freelance designers, videographers, editors, programmers, SEO specialists and marketers.

Toffsworld continues to expand developing new concepts continuously.

Our Internet audience

Between March 2008 and February 2009 Toffsworld was visited by almost 1.9 million individuals. We classify an ‘Individual’ as someone who has visited the website only once in the past 24 hours. Any further visits within 24 hours are not counted.

Nearly 30% of our Internet traffic comes from readers who have previously ‘Bookmarked’ us or received a newsletter from us. The other 70% comes from a variety of online publications including Google, Yahoo, MSN, Forbes Magazine, The BBC etc.

In total, approximately 7,000 websites around the world link to us. (You can go to Google.com and search for ‘toffsworld’ if you wish. The top right hand corner of the results page will show Googles interpretation of this figure – which can vary between 5,500 and 8,000 links.) These in-bound links are of course very important as they reflect the value of Toffsworld as an Internet property.

Demographics

Based on feedback from individual surveys that we take over the telephone, and databases that we buy in, we would describe our readers as generally wealthy people who seek out quality, as well as the finer things in life.

Other attributes that make up our readership suggest that they are:

Homeowners
Credit card Holders
£50,000 plus Household Income
Generally Professional / Senior Management or Business people
Age 30 to 64
Majority can be contacted by Email.

Readers are fairly evenly divided between Males and Females and most individuals tend to be based in the UK (45%), USA (25%) Continental Europe (15%), Other English speaking countries (15%).

Achieving our Audience

Toffsworlds aim has always been to provide quality information about quality products to people with money. One of our taglines is ‘Inspiration for the affluent’.

To achieve the right audience for Toffsworld, we’ve been careful over the years not to use language or gimmicks within the website that just create traffic for the sake of it. Our choice of words are deliberate.

We also boost our readership by advertising on TV channels such as Sky Arts, Luxe TV, Biography Channel, Real Estate TV, Sky News and Movie Channel because we know that these channels have a similar viewer profile to Toffsworld advertisers and readers.

We do something else that is quite unique. If a product is good enough to be advertised on Toffsworld, then we also promote it in the form of advertorial. We don’t differentiate between advertising and editorial – they’re both equally good in our opinion.

Structure

Toffsworld has three offices. The head-office is in Malaga, Spain, where Dawn and Peter work from. See Reasons for Living in Spain

Several members of the team liaise with the London office while the New York office is completely virtual, its sole purpose being to redirect American telephone and Internet traffic to London or Malaga. This is a concept that American businesses seem to love and appreciate.

Our computer servers are based in Cambridge, UK and Dallas, Texas, so that we can leverage the advantages of having IP addresses on both sides of the Atlantic for search engine purposes. See Technical Jargon

Our freelance team of designers and developers come from practically all over the world and between them speak multiple languages.

Toffsworld can trade in Dollar, Euro and Sterling and has bank accounts in London and Malaga. We don’t bank in the USA but we are fully authorized to trade in the US and receive dollar payments to our European accounts.

Toffsworld is registered as Toffsworld LTD in Truro, Cornwall and Toffsworld SL in Marbella, Spain. Clients can choose whether they wish to trade with us under UK or Spanish law.

Reasons for Living in Spain

Malaga enjoys clear blue skies approximately 320 days a year and as for family life, Southern Spain is hard to beat. Our children adore the place yet still get to spend the best part of 2 months a year in England and Ireland, as well as other travels.

We moved to Spain in 2003, secure in the knowledge that Toffsworld could operate from any country. This is the age of the Internet and running a business from Spain is far cheaper than trying to run one from the UK. The average wage in Malaga is still a modest €1,000 a month yet most young people that we aim to recruit speak 2 or 3 languages.

And so we’ve continued to grow. In 2008, we ran 17 TV commercials of our own going out to about 5 million people in the UK.

Technical Jargon

Toffsworld runs off of two dedicated Intel Dual Processor servers capable of handling 160 simultaneous queries each.

The operating system we use is Linux, running Apache Software and SQL Databases.

On top of this we use a Content Management System (CMS) called Joomla – a free, open source system. Practically all of the software we use on Toffsworld is Open Source.

From time to time, we employ specialist programmers from the joomla/linux community to write bespoke software for us. The rest we do in house including 24 server management. Almost daily, we are checking server stats of one description or another to check for any breakages, hacks or errors.

Our bandwidth runs onto a T1 connection making it as fast as is reasonably possible and virtually unlimited in the data we can serve. We sometimes have 40 or 50 people watching videos at the same time without any interruption to service. In fact, our operating system is streamlined to run endless videos. All this costs money which is why we don’t run $20 a year accounts – there’s more work and responsibility to it than that.

We run our own email server, we can host other peoples domain names and technically we could be classified if we so wished, as an Internet Service Provider in our own right.

When we do emails, we’re capable of processing about 10,000 a minute.

There are a variety of Toffsworld domain names feeding into each other, some running out of the UK, some America.