Friday, May 24, 2019

Design House Partnership

I cant believe how much we have changed in a relatively short time. From being an inward-looking manufacturer,we became a customer-focused invent and stumbleoperation. Now we are an integrated service provider. Most of our modernistic business comes from the partnerships we have formed with design houses. In effect, we design harvest-homes jointly with specialist design houses that have a well-known brand, and offer them a complete service of manufacturing and distribution.In many ways we are now a business-to-business company earlier than abusiness-to consumer company. (Jim Thompson, CEO, conception Design Services (CDS)) CDS had become one of Europes most economic homeware businesses. Originally founded in the 1960s, the company had moved from making industrial mouldings, mainly in the aerospace sector, and some cheap homeware items such as buckets and dust pans, sold under the Focus brand name, to making very high-quality (expensive) stylish homewares with a high design val ue.The move into Concept products, The move into higher-margin homeware had been masterminded by Linda Fleet, CDSs Marketing Director, who had previously worked for a large retail chain of cay and wallpaper retailers. Experience in the decorative products industry had taught me the importance of fashion and product development, even in mundane products such as paint. Premium-priced colours and new textures would become popular for one or two years, supported by appropriate promotion and features in lifestyle magazines.The manufacturers and retailers who created and supported these products were dramatically more profitable than those who simply provided standard range of mountainss. Instinctively, I felt that this must also apply to homeware. We decided to develop a whole coordinated range of such items, and to bluff up a new distribution network for them to serve upmarket stores, kitchen equipment and speciality retailers. Within a year of launching our first new range of kitche n homeware under the Concept brand name, we had over 3000 retail outlets signed up, provided with point-of-sale display facilities.Press coverage generated an enormous interest which was reinforced by the product placement on several TV cookery and lifestyle programmes. We soon developed an entirely new market and within two years Concept products were providing over 75 per cent of our revenue and 90 per cent of our profits. The price realization of Concept products is many times higher than for the Focus range. To keep leading we launched new ranges at regular intervals.

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