A few weeks ago I decided to try a purchase from UK based store, New Look.  Their clothing’s a not really great, it looks quite cheap & ill-fitting BUT they have really nice shoes & bags.  Two of my favourite things in the world!

One really awesome perk is that they do FREE delivery worldwide for orders over £55.  Sweeeeeet.  I decided to test the waters with a small purchase, so I got two easy priced bags & some pretty undies.  According to their website my order was suppose to arrive within 5 – 7 working days, which seemed pretty good as my orders from Forever21.com in the US usually take about the same amount of time to arrive.  But then to my surprise, my order status changed to “dispatched” practically overnight… this got me very excited…

Sadly that excitement faded as each day passed… and eventually the days turned into weeks… and then by last week I had kinda prepared myself for my order never ever arriving.  I decided to email them to find out whether they could tell me where my parcel was as the tracking feature on the website wasn’t working with my tracking number.  This is when they told me that they actually can’t track international orders.  Interesting news as they certainly don’t explain that part on their Delivery & Returns help pages.  They told me that if my order hadn’t arrived by 20 Apr, I could proceed to officially log a request for them to find out what happened to it.  At that point I thought to myself… “Gawd, it’s been almost 4 weeks, I bet you someone from the SA postal service is already wearing my damn underwear!!!”

Then on “D-day” I finally got a notice from the post office about an international parcel ready for collection.  Talk about cutting it fine.  I rushed over there and had to pay R15 to have the parcel released, but I wasn’t asked to pay any custom duties.  I couldn’t believe my luck as one would normally expect to be nailed with about 45% import tax (and that’s certainly what I had prepared myself for), but seems I was a very very lucky girl.  I’m not sure if they just decided to let the first order slide, or maybe the way it was packaged made sure it didn’t raise any eyebrows…  I mean, it did arrive in a bloody black bag! haha.  Check it out:

This parcel screams "this person has no money!"

I was a bit worried about what state my things would be in, but everything was cool.   Here’s my zig zag weave oversized clutch which I got for £12.99:

And then my black & white colour block satchel with a mock crock feel (£19.99):

And lastly my cute undies which were between £4.99 and £5.99 each:

Size wise, the UK is the same as SA. So if you're a size 8 here, you'll be a size 8 there. Easy peasy.

The undies aren’t the worlds best quality – I would say they’re kinda on par with Mr Price’s underwear.  So I wouldn’t say they were the best deal (pound to rand exchange rate sits at about 12.66 at the moment).  But I LOVE my two bags.

Oh and boys, they have a mens section as well.  I did a quick browse through their mens shoes & accessories section and they have some really nice things there.  Items which caught my eye included these funky Gola sneakers for £34.99:

And these fold over shoes which are on sale for only £15!

Perfect for winter guys...

Oh and my absolute favourite, check out this awesome moustache print wallet for £6.99:

Seriously, how cool is that?

So will I order from New Look again?  Yeah, it’s likely.  It loses big points on the instant gratification scale, but at least next time I’ll be prepared for the long wait.

I’m a bit sad that we’re now pretty much right into cold, miserable winter weather… cause I’ve kinda fallen in love with these babies:

Colour block strappy sandals - £19.99

xxx