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Regency Chess USA is now live – Our finest chess sets are now available in America!

The Regency Chess Company has become very firmly established in the UK and Europe since our creation in 2008. New for 2018 is our launch in the USA market with a brand new website Regency Chess USA. The new website features a selection of our mid range and luxury chess and backgammon sets. The new site features:-

  • Our amazing range of luxury Staunton chessmen
  • Free shipping to all US states
  • Tax free shopping (orders under $850)
  • Fast shipping (2-3 days transit time)
  • Superb range of products
Regency Chess USA
Regency Chess USA

 

 

Since 2008 we have served a large number of customers in the USA but we have taken the decision to fully open up this ripe market place.

CategoriesRegency Chess Co. News

Job Vacancy – E-Commerce Channel Manager

Job Title:  E-Commerce Channel Manager

Location: Frome, Somerset

Hours of work: F/T 37 hours per week

Salary: £20k basic with performance bonus to £27k OTE

Position Overview

As our E-Commerce Channel Manager, you will be responsible for growing our sales through optimising existing sales channels, opening new channels, managing partner-website relationships, active marketing and maintaining our published online content.  

The role is very varied including SEO, social media (FB, Instagram etc.), website content writing, project management, graphic design and video editing.

You will need the drive to grow revenue and profit, with the ingenuity to spot opportunities that can be exploited.

The Regency Chess Company expects both a high level of professionalism and a personal touch. The successful applicant will be able to build rapport with external contacts and develop close working relationships with internal team members.

As we are a small team, there will be times when you will need to cover other roles so being a team-player with a willingness to get stuck in is essential. 

You will manage your own time efficiently, and balance technical and administrative tasks.

Essential Job Functions

  • Proactive management of sales platforms/channels (including accurate syncing to existing company software, product descriptions, content writing, pricing and images)
  • Working with the business owner to identify new sales opportunities
  • Proactive marketing for the business
  • Building effective relationships with external contacts and the internal team
  • Ability to work without supervision
  • Owning projects & tasks from start to completion
  • Monitor and adapt to the changing needs of e-Commerce platforms, flexing approach as necessary
  • Work collaboratively across the business to meet company objectives
  • Take ownership of solving problems
  • Very sharp attention to detail and investigative mindset

Qualifications and desirable skills

  • Sales Channel management
  • Marketing experience
  • Excellent communication skills
  • Demonstrates ownership and is comfortable working individually and in a team
  • Active interest in e-Commerce
  • Quick to pick up new information and a willingness to learn
  • Self-starter with enthusiasm for personal development
  • Strong IT background
  • Adobe Photoshop skills
  • Experience of the following systems;
    • Amazon Seller Central
    • Ebay
    • Woo Commerce
    • WordPress
    • MS Office

 

The Regency Chess Company

Established for over ten years The Regency Chess Company has become Europe’s leading online retailer of traditional games. We run a small yet dedicated team in our business premises in Frome, Somerset and offer a superb range of products alongside top-quality customer service.

Benefits include

  • Performance-related bonus
  • Company pension scheme
  • Free tea & coffee at the in-house staff specialty coffee shop

Regency Chess Company values

Professionalism – Approaches others in a tactful manner and manages expectations. Treats others with respect and consideration regardless of their status or position.

Teamwork – Balances team and individual responsibilities. Gives and welcomes feedback. Contributes to building a positive team spirit whilst supporting everyone’s efforts to succeed.

Customer service – Manages all Customer situations with appropriate action and responds promptly to customer needs and meets commitments, both internally and externally. Has an excellent telephone manner and communicates to customers in a user-friendly language.

Problem solving – Identifies and resolves problems in a timely manner, gathering and analysing information skillfully. Develops alternative solutions and escalates as appropriate.

Technical skills – Commits to being knowledgeable and up-to-date within relevant technologies. Strives continuously to build knowledge and skills, especially within the business’ core areas. Shares expertise and knowledge with others.

Time Management – Prioritise and plans work activities using time efficiently. Meets required commitments on quantity and quality of work.

To apply for the role please email your CV and covering letter to  [email protected]

CategoriesChess Products

5th wedding anniversary gifts for husband

5th wedding anniversary gifts for husband aren’t always easy to choose but luckily we’ve managed to put together a lovely selection of wooden gift ideas with a massive ‘wow’ factor. I know if you’re like me then you often rack your mind for hours trying to think of the ultimate wedding anniversary gift. You want something that has a good wow factor, something that shows you thought about it, and something that is going to last and create a long loving memory. If you’re buying a gift for him then a Luxury or mid range wooden chess, backgammon or mah jong set is the ideal present. It’ll be something that fits in perfectly with the fifth anniversary but will still be around on the 50th!

Below are some products that have been selected by myself (the owner of the business) that are the perfect solution for a fifth wedding anniversary gift for your husband. As it turns out, I am writing this just four days prior to my own fifth wedding anniversary.

The first chess set has to be the Sovereign Luxury Ebony and Walnut Chess Set

Sovereign luxury chess set - 5th wedding anniversary gifts for husband

This amazing chess set has an incredible wow factor. It’s not cheap, but if you’re looking for the perfect fifth wedding anniversary present and your man has an interest in chess, this set is certain to make him happy. The pieces are real ebony (for the dark side) and are expertly crafted in the classic traditional Staunton style. There is nothing too custom, fancy or outlandish about this set which means anyone who likes chess, will love this set.


If you’re budget is limited but you still want to make him smile there’s the Highclere Ebony and Walnut chess set

Highclear chess set - 5th wedding anniversary gifts for husband

This lovely chess set is very similar to the first one, has a lower price point but still features real ebony chessmen and a stunning Italian dark walnut chess board. It’s slightly smaller than the first example but looks just as striking. A set of this quality will be around for your 5th wedding anniversary, and also your 50th.

The Dal Negro London Luxury Walnut Backgammon Set.  There simply is no better backgammon set than an Italian Dal Negro Set

Dal Negro Backgammon set

A stunning set from the master craftsmen at Dal Negro in Italy. A substantial product that will outlast both of you and be passed down for future generations. We are always delighted with the offerings from this company who have a history going back over one hundred years. We’ve sold many as wedding presents but given it’s made almost entirely from wood, it’s perfectly suited to a 5th anniversary.

Wood Anniversary gifts for him

Most of what we sell at The Regency Chess Company is made from wood, so there’s little surprise that we stock some ideal gifts for the 5th wedding anniversary. We supply products made from a variety of extremely high quality, and in some cases, rare hard woods. It’s also worth noting that many of the woods concerned, such as ebony, are constantly rising in price and becoming more and more scarce. So many of our sets represent excellent investments. The list of wedding anniversary gifts states that wood is the traditional gift material for both the UK and USA regions but does list silverware as the modern alternative. If you wanted to cover all bases you’d need a gift that was made from both wood and silver!

The Dal Negro Luxury Walnut Mah Jong Set

The Italian company Dal Negro have presented another superb luxury product to us in the form of this lovely Walnut Mah Jong set. The set has been crafted in Italy to an excellent standard. It’s a heavy and substantial set with very tactile game pieces and a very high quality of finish. It will make the ideal gift for that special someone and it has the benefit of being a great two player game as well as a few more if you’re that way inclined. An ideal gift for any wedding anniversary but highly appropriate for the fifth one.


The Old English Elite Chess Set in ebony and mahogany

5th wedding anniversary gifts for husband

For the ultimate and classic wedding anniversary present this chess set is by far one of the best we offer. It’s 100% traditional, no modern flamboyance at all, it’s essentially  a very accurate replica of the original Victorian Staunton Chessmen and even the woods used are authentic. The black pieces are real ebony wood and the white pieces are boxwood. The board is all wooden and made from Mahogany and birch. It comes with a hardwood storage case for the chessmen too. The real gem with this set is the pieces, they are extremely elegant, superbly made and of the finest quality, each one has been weighted for perfect balance.

5th Wedding Anniversary Gifts for Husband

There is little doubt that buying a suitable wedding anniversary gift isn’t easy. I hope that the range of all wooden gifts on this page have offered you some inspiration and demonstrated that some really lovely items are made from wood and that they make the perfect gift for him. For a choice of hundreds of lovely wooden gifts visit our website at The Regency Chess Company We offer extremely fast shipment all over the world and can deliver 7 days a week in the UK with next working day delivery available too. Treat your husband to something really special this year, get him something he’ll still be enjoying on his 50th wedding anniversary too!

CategoriesChess Products

Cool Chess Sets – Some of our coolest chess sets

We are often asked, what is your coolest chess set. It’s a difficult question to answer, we have hundreds of products on our chess retail website and it’s sometimes hard to determine which ones stand out as being particularly cool. Below is a list of our top three coolest chess sets (in our humble opinion).

  1. The Black Sovereign Luxury Chess Set

This set is one of our firm favourites. It’s a classic Staunton design and just looks absolutely stunning.

Luxury cool chess set

What makes it cool?

The main attraction to this set is the board. It’s Italian (enough said) and has been crafted to an extreme level. It’s high gloss and features stunning rich wood grains, lovely deep chocolate brown tones. The high gloss surface of the board reflects the stunning ebony chessmen which adds another dimension to it. The pieces themselves are classic Staunton, made to exacting standards of perfection. Ebony is a rare and valuable wood that constantly rises in price as it becomes more scarce, so this set will always retain a high value. There’s two additional queens, so when you reach that stage of the game when you can add a second queen to your army, there’s no need to improvise.


2. The Blue Metropolis chess set

This ultra cool set comes from Italy and aside from being amazing quality is also a design classic. We’ve been selling this set for years and it’s always been a firm favourite.

What makes it so cool?

Firstly the board is blue, a lovely deep rich blue with stunning grains and figuring. Blue might not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s certainly striking. Secondly, it’s Italian, and pretty much everything that’s Italian is cool! The pieces are old school futuristic, they are based on a vision of the future that people had in the 1950s. The metal pieces have been expertly turned (lathed) rather than cast, which gives them a very cool precision engineered look.


3. The Alghero Onyx and marble chess set

This lovely chess set come from our friends in Italy is is certainly a very cool chess set

What makes it so cool?

What makes this set cool is the material. Onyx is a stunning natural mineral that has been adored by people for years. Every set is unique, the patterns in the onyx are naturally formed so you’ll never get two sets the same. It’s heavy, looks beautiful and will make for a real head turning centre piece in your home. Need we also mention that this set is also Italian. It comes from Italfama who are one of the worlds most established producers of luxury chess products.

CategoriesRegency Chess Co. News

We are Hiring! : Digital Marketing Technician

Digital Marketing Technician  

Location: Frome, Somerset

Salary: £20,000-£23,000 per annum + annual bonus

Position: Permanent Full Time 35 Hrs p/w

Sector: Online Retail / E-commerce

 

Let your creative juices flow!

 

A fantastic opportunity has arisen for a Digital Marketing Technician at JDS Toys & Games Ltd based in Frome.

 

Your core skills in Photoshop, combined with your eye for a good marketing stance will be integral to pushing this thriving, leading deluxe chess and backgammon retailer into it’s next growth phase.

 

Role Responsibilities:

 

  • Turning raw product photographs into stunning images for the websites
  • Ensure product images are created to a consistently excellent standard
  • Responsible for new products being added to the websites promptly
  • Liaise with product photographer
  • Increasing sales through product listing optimization
  • Creating new product listings
  • Developing compelling product descriptions
  • Completing pricing and competitor analysis

 

Your Skills:

 

  • Advanced Photoshop skills essential
  • High level of IT literacy
  • Excellent written communication skills
  • Ability to work fast, efficiently and on own initiative
  • Intermediate Microsoft Word & Excel
  • Previous experience of E-commerce / .com industry preferable
  • Intermediate Google analytics and Zen Cart/Word Press skills are desirable
  • Previous experience of Amazon Seller Central platform preferable

 

Remuneration & Benefits:

Annual salary £20,000-£23,000 depending on experience, annual bonus of up to £2,000, pension, 20 days paid annual leave + bank holidays. Plentiful free parking.

 

Your employer:

The company takes pride in both the quality of products they sell, as well as the high ethical standards they maintain regarding the production and sourcing of their products. They sell their luxury products through online sales channels including Amazon marketplaces worldwide, their own website and a sister site.

As a Digital Marketing Technician you will be responsible for taking control of the company’s online selling channels.

 

The company operates in a hardworking but light-hearted environment and offers an on-site, staff only, speciality coffee shop.

 

If you wish to apply for the role of Digital Marketing Technician please submit your CV with an accompanying covering letter to [email protected]. Detail how your relevant skills and experience make you an ideal candidate for the job.

 

We will not invade your right to privacy or cause unfair work place discrimination by carrying out any form of criminal record check on you. We are a genuine equal opportunities employer. 

CategoriesRegency Chess Co. News

Chess Apps – How Functional Are They?

CHESS AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

Mobile Chess Interface
Mobile Chess Interface

We live in a culture of apps. Without apps, our smartphones, albeit powerful devices, would be stripped to the bare minimum. Even texting is an application! The ability to utilise third-party software on your phone is what makes it an extraordinary utility. Once, you were limited to the applications your phone provided, but not anymore; now, we have the luxury of choice, an essential component to customer experience So, whilst it’s certainly true to say we live in a “culture of apps”, it might be more appropriate, and accurate, to say we live in the ‘age of customisation’.

When we came to sit down and write this blog post, we initially decided to select four or so chess apps and review each one in turn. But given the size and scope of the app world, we didn’t feel comfortable selecting a handful at random and passing judgement without a better sense of context and a wider knowledge of what was available. It was plainly too arbitrary. As such, this post will principally serve as an introduction to chess apps, why they’re such an interesting development, and a broad look at what they have to offer more generally.

 

RAPID GROWTH

Chess on your iPhone
Chess on your iPhone

We can shape our handheld devices and cater them to our specific wants and needs – if we so choose, of course. The basic utilities remain, but with a few clicks on your device’s store page, you can make it into a whole lot more. From installing your preferred news outlet to alternative instant messaging apps, such as WhatsApp or Hangouts, your phone is a thoroughly malleable item. There are millions of apps available (for an example of the enormity of this trend, check out Apple’s trajectory of apps available, measured against the amount of times downloaded – that’s over one million apps in four years) many of which are free and most likely cross-platform (there’s also a lot of money to be made in microtransactions, ads, app costs, etc.). Anyone can develop an app, upload it, and instantly gauge peoples responses to it, and then tweak it accordingly – updates are rolled out continuously in response to feedback, bugs, and so on. It’s an enormous enterprise, and it barely existed until a few years ago. Now, it’s bigger than ever.

CHESS AS AN APP

So it comes as no surprise, then, that are quite literally hundreds of chess apps there. Hundreds! A couple of weeks ago we wrote about the world of digital chess and cursorily looked at the computer programs powerful enough to usurp world champions (see Kasparov and the Deep Blue event). It’s worth noting that we find it unlikely that the increasing power of computer systems capable of playing extremely skilled games of chess will supplant the nature of chess itself. That is to say, we don’t see it leading us away from human-to-human interaction, but it does have something very important and valuable to say about chess, the game, itself, which we’ll get to in the coming weeks.

Minimalistic, accessible Interface for Android
Minimalistic, accessible Interface for Android

But that human-to-human play over a board has changed in many respects, principally with the proliferation of apps and their ability to allow players access to one another over their smartphones, tablets, and so on. It is possible to have a speed game of chess with someone on the other side of the globe and finish the game within less than ten minutes. This poses exciting new possibilities for chess, at least to some extent. With concentration spans arguably diminishing, and peoples time being ever more precious and limited, there’s a very real chance – and this isn’t backed up with figures, it’s simply conjecture – that less and less people are going to take the time to sit down over a chess board and participate in a game of some length. Unless you’re a chess enthusiast or a regular board game player that, we think, is a fair assumption to make. Now, that is not to say players haven’t participated in games via alternative modes of communication before, but now we’re seeing a different kind of engagement and a different kind of interactivity. With chess at your fingertips – whether you’re a professional, amateur, or just someone keen to know more – there’s a huge opportunity to reach out to a wider community.

LITERALLY HUNDREDS!

As mentioned in the introduction, our plan to review a select few apps was nixed when it was clear there were so many available. So, we thought a broader approach on what chess apps can offer would be appropriate.

In our Digital Chess post we covered a lot of the different features apps have to offer: the ability to retrace your steps and watch replays, correct a move should you be practising (or, as is always a possibility on a handheld device, accidentally3d chess clicked the wrong spot!), and to tweak the difficulty level of your AI opponent. This is often in the form of a difficulty metre, but more often than that now it’s a matter of tweaking the computer’s response time, as they’re generally very quick on their ‘feet’ and able to plan their moves ahead of time essentially instantaneously.

The aesthetic of the apps is also worth mentioning as it brings us back to choice. If you’re going to be playing on your mobile, what is it you want to be looking at? A chess board, obviously, but there’s a choice there between the flat, two dimensional boards and the 3D iterations of the game. Personally, we’re more in favour of the flat, birds-eye-view aesthetic; it’s clean, minimalistic, and simple. Many of them have audio, but that too can be tweaked (we don’t: if an app gets the sound just right, there’s a real pleasure in hearing the ‘click’ as your chosen piece is moved to its designated place on the board). And if you’re in the process of learning the game, almost all apps will happily provide an option to show where each piece can move once you have clicked on it. And besides replays, there are ancillary apps that allow you to keep track of your games and your movements without having to jot them down, allowing you to pour over the game after to plot it out differently.

Returning to the 3D chess apps, the problem begins with the aesthetics: they’re clunky, obtrusive, and, at least to us, are a move away from what apps ought to be: accessible. The idea is obviously an interesting one and it’s been around for some time, but the practicalities of playing on a 3D chess board via your phone seems to fly in the face of what the app should be offering: quick, minimalist engagement with the game. You can’t replicate the feel of sitting down with someone over a chess board, so offering alternative tool with a minimal interface is arguably the better option.

THE MAGNUS CARSLEN CHESS APP

The Magnus Carlsen App
The Magnus Carlsen App

One of the best apps we found is the official Magnus Carlsen app. Endorsed by Carlsen himself, this particular app is one of a kind. Indeed, it pushes up against one of the most important themes running through our posts: that chess is an essential tool in education, and one more than capable of making the world a much smarter place. As we’ve constantly iterated, chess apps bring accessibility, and they bring unity. Such is the mission statement of the team behind this great app.

The unique selling point for this app – which is free! – is that players can challenge Carlsen at various ages, from 5 upwards, when he first started taking an interest in chess. The computer is tailored to the skill set of Carlsen at these ages, and provides some background information on him as you progress. It’s fresh and exciting and allows players to engage with the chess world, which might otherwise remain on the periphery. There are learning videos, some of which are free, others of which have to be bought, and there’s also the opportunity to play Carlsen live should you win a tournament.

Thus far, this has absolutely proven itself our favourite app (alongside chess for android, which is super accessible and easy to use), and if you’re looking for a little more than just a standard chess game, then this is the app for you. Interestingly enough, Carlsen managed to lose at his ten-year-old self… I’m at age 8, the point at which most players begin to lose on average to the computerised Carlsen. Let’s see if I can get to 9…

 

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