PEOPLE
DEALER INTERVIEW
doing. And that’s the biggest thing in our industry – I think everybody’s lost control of what they’re doing. At the moment, it seems to go cheapest price, cheapest price, cheapest price. That matters, don’t get me wrong it does, you need to be competitive in the marketplace against the guys we’re up against every day of the week, but also you need to protect your own infrastructure in the country and that hasn’t happened. It’ll never come back because most of these places are either housing estates – or they’ve been flattened. So manufacturing in the UK is in dire straits and that’s the biggest problem [we’ve] got. Does brand matter? Everybody spoke to us in the marketplace about how the brand matters – and it did matter – and it still does matter. And then the wholesalers start ripping on the brands that have been growing for donkey’s years. I just don’t understand the method beyond the madness. You try to get your customer on to one area of what you’re doing and all of a sudden they tell us it’s changed again and the customer’s changing again – and it’s just so much upset for us, for the salespeople, for me as a purchasing manager. [Look at] the Neville boys: they spent 20-30 years growing a massive brand and their focus was just through the wholesaler and then they’re dropped like that. They would never come to us direct because they had that loyalty and it matters. It matters from a purchasing manager’s point of view and it also matters from their point of view. Without those, we’re nothing.
What is important to us is not necessarily getting new accounts, but getting everything on the accounts you’ve already got Is price erosion a problem? The cheaper a product becomes, the cheaper we have to sell it. That’s the basis of it – and we’ve done that to ourselves. The wholesalers have allowed it to happen. They’ve smashed each other to pieces as they’re the ones that guide us and they just dropped and dropped the marketplace and everybody else, the likes of Lyreco and Office Depot, followed and it just means that pound for pound there’s less being made. You can’t go back. Years ago if you got them onto a brand, you’d keep them on that brand, but today, you can’t go anywhere. You stay on the white box product and that’s the product you sell. But then the customer is kicking back and saying they want the brand again. They’d rather pay more for something that’s going to last over time. It’s up to the wholesalers to keep those brands fighting – but it’s all led by money at the end of the day. Do you use any other distributors besides Spicers? We use VOW; UFP for our EOS, but there again we buy from various different sources for our EOS. We use Eagle for our envelopes, Antalis for our paper.
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MAY 2012 www.dealersupport.co.uk