New SS22 Catalogue – Online Canton Fair – Doing business online
It’s that time of the year again. Under normal conditions we would be hasting and stressing to get all the samples ready on time, pack ship and unpack again in Guangzhou where we would attend the Canton Fair. This April it’s the third time that there has not been a physical fair – and the Canton Fair has been around for over 64 years now – so you could imagine the initial shock last year when the fair was cancelled. Luckily an online alternative was presented swiftly and the factories and exporters could show their wares via video and online meetings. It took a little getting used to, but we think we now got the hang of it after having done it for 3 times now. The procedure is quite a bit different, but it does start with prepping the samples on time. We have designed a virtual meeting and showroom to receive our customers and just like the actual fair its always exciting to see who enters our virtual booth. I must admit that it’s a welcome change for once to not have to pack – unpack – pack and unpack the samples the way we normally do while prepping a booth.
We also joined the ranks of the online producers and the last couple of months we have been really going deep into getting our social media up to speed, our new(!) website online and we invested in an online catalogue. We have 3 already: Spring Summer 2021, Autumn Winter 21/22 and now Spring Summer 2022 – just released today! A totally new range of products have been merged into a handy online format where all our customers and interested potentials from all over the world can dig into and browse and choose. Almost as good as the real thing and you can just do it from your lazy chair. We are still trying to find ways to overcome the fact that it is not possible to touch the samples the way you can when you are visiting our booth, but we have some ideas for that too.
Doing business online is the future, there is no denying. It will take a great deal of adjusting but it will not go away anymore. This goes for the part for the producers and sellers, where they offer their products to importers and retailers but this also goes for the retailer who want to sell this to their end customers. We have already added the component: ready for online sales y/n? into our design checklist. If it is anyhow possible to make it flatpack or reducing the cbm somehow we will definitely do this. Many online vendors have detailed specifics as to how big an outter shipping carton may be – this size influences the shipping cost greatly so this is a very important factor too. Other than that we try to include more products which look great and sell well online – great gifts and gadgets. In other words: the world is changing as we know it, but we like the challenge and are ready for a new tomorrow..