OPINION
WHO PAYS FOR THE SAMPLES? Antoni Bullón
ome weeks ago I ran into my friend Miguel Roig on the way from Malpensa airport to Cernobbio, where Proposte is held every year, a trade fair I’m particularly fond of and which I’ve visited since it began. As would be expected, we were chatting about the current state of affairs, and he invited me to write an article about something I believe to be of paramount importance: Who Pays for the Samples? (This title is inspired by an article published about five months ago in The Economist entitled ‘Who pays for the Party?).
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JORGE SMILED AT ME, AND THEN CHUCKLED TO HIMSELF, SURELY AS A RESULT OF MY IGNORANCE, AND SAID, “THEY’RE NOT PIECES, THEY’RE SAMPLES! HERE WE SELL THE SAMPLES TO THE CLIENTS.”
Towards the end of March I visited a decoration fair in Porto (basically for furniture, upholstery and home decoration). While I was chatting with my good friend Jorge Antunes, who owns a company that distributes decoration items, seeing that all of his three staff were busy dealing with clients, Jorge politely broke off our chat and went to attend to a middle-aged woman and her daughter. Some twenty or twenty-five minutes later, after saying goodbye to his clients, he came over to me with an order form duplicate in his hand; despite the fact that the pages were folded over, I got the impression that the client had written down a number of references, and so I said to him, “Nice sale, Jorge.” He replied, “Not bad.” Hearing his comment, I added, “ So it looks like the crisis isn’t affecting you so badly here in Portugal, it’s not easy to sell 10 or 12 pieces these days.”
TEXTILES PARA EL HOGAR Nº 244 / PAG. 37
Jorge smiled at me, and then chuckled to himself, surely as a result of my ignorance, and said, “They’re not pieces, they’re samples! Here we sell the samples to the clients.” Jorge took pity on me, and seeing my expression of surprise said, “The most logical thing is that the client chooses the samples they want to have in their business. What’s the point of having 30 similar models of the same item? If my client chooses, they are better equipped to defend the image of their business and make it easier to sell; it means that the cost of the samples is shared out more equally between the three parties involved: the supplier, the retailer and the final customer. At the end of the day, we’re all in the same boat.” To date, thousands of euros have been invested in samples, in many cases without obtaining the right level of cost effectiveness. Today, more than ever before, we have to re-think this situation, as the ‘party’ can’t go on forever. It would be interesting to organise a meeting between distributors, manufacturers and wholesalers on this issue. I’m sure that most professional retailers would understand it if the right focus was chosen. What do you think about the idea?