My boss is considering using them to fulfill directly to FBA on .ca. I’ve never heard of them and I’m not wild about getting into international shipping, but he is really gung-ho about it.
Sounds like a name people throw around.
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They used to be “First Choice Shipping”.
I’m not sure how they plug in to FBA Global???
I don’t know. I came in to work this morning and my boss tells me he hired another employee to focus on getting us into private labeling.
My frustration level is… high.
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It really is one of the few tools to prevent others from pulling the rug out from under you. You can protect yourself from Amazon, foreign sellers, and brand owners when they decide they want to replace you and go direct to consumer.
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If you are referring to private label, I would say that depends what you sell.
Almost everything we sell is items from major brands, international scale manufacturers, not the kind of stuff people can buy generic and private label. The brand owners don’t sell the stuff directly to end users, they use regional distributors and national wholesalers, which we have been for over 50 years.
If we get into private labeling, it would mean finding new items to sell in other industries. And since I am not part of that conversation (or I wouldn’t have been notified of a new employee making this their only focus after they were already hired) and since nobody else who works here can be trusted to do any kind of due diligence before jumping in head first, I don’t see how a blind foray into the wonderful world of generic imports can possible go wrong.
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It all depends on how beholden you want your existence to be tied to the whims of another company. I have seen aftermarket auto parts manufacturers dump distributors and become Amazon vendors overnight leaving dealers and distributors hanging in the wind without a pot to piss in, scrambling to find a new manufacturer.
In todays profits-over-people corporate leadership, shareholders have no problem destroying your 50 year relationship for a one penny per share dividend, or the ability to buyback their own stock before sucking the cash out of a company you rely on for your your inventory.
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This is definitely a possibility, but private labeling isn’t the answer since I can’t private label already branded items. For example, Honeywell is a multinational company that manufactures all its own stuff. There is no generic alternative that I can sell as Maintak branded parts and compete with them. Any generic items that would compete with their items would be of such poor quality that I would be embarrassed to sell them, much less under my own brand name. That leaves manufacturing my own stuff, which has never been part of our business plan. I wouldn’t even know where to start, and there is no chance I could compete with a multi-billion dollar company at their own game.
Private labeling in general might be a path worth going down, if for no other reason than to further diversify our catalog, but that means moving into other industries that we know less about, and hiring someone who doesn’t know anything about our business to run our private labeling enterprise essentially unsupervised a terrible idea that I will have a front row seat to when it explodes in slow motion.
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Honeywell has been around a long time and has many items with expired patents that are reproduced frequently. We source a former Honeywell ECM headlight controller that is now treated like generic drugs. Can you do it with everything, no. Does it mean you have nothing, no.
This is where being a product professional is more valuable than being a sales professional and niche markets allow you to dominate what you do know instead of relying on the manufacturer to shoehorn you into industries that may not fit your business model. Voice your concerns about this individual if they are not an industry guru.
It is a TERRIBLE idea.
There are several reasons why I don’t want to get too far into trying to find expired patents from major manufacturers in our industry to private label, This discussion goes beyond the scope of this thread and involves information that I do not want to post in the public section of the forum.
I would agree with this. My boss apparently does not. If we had a long discussion in the company between people who have been working with these items about what kind of product we can get involved in that we know enough about to source decent items and sell well, this would be a different conversation.
I have voiced my concerns in the past when he came up with schemes like this, and he has ignored me every time. It is also worth noting that my concerns have borne out every time. But he still insists that I’m an alarmist and don’t know anything I warn about is actually true and that this time it will work out just like he thinks. Meh.
I feel you. Your point is a primary reason I sold off portions of companies I did not have enough leverage to alter the course of. One of them is dying fast as a result of not doing PL, where a manufacturer went around them, direct to the dealers due to lack of brand rights, another one is hurting because they did a PL on a dead product for an application they knew little about… forklifts.
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Yah but PL is a whole different beast than wholesale, i.e. sharing the buybox with a billion other people. Private equity firms have tried to cross into the space with aggressive acquisitions and been bitch slapped the fuq out. For another thread tho.
So never a recall on the I told you so moments with your boss eh? Or is that a no no because their is a level of hierarchical propriety that should not be crossed? I feel so smart saying “hierarchical propriety.”
I have a whole “this is what happens when you ignore me” dance routine, at this point. It just doesn’t make a difference.
I have spent $500 on creating a metal base and plug in electrical system to remind my supervisor of the time they ran over a taxi light before they became the commander and became holier than thou. Humility was a daily reminder in the ready/briefing room, simply because there was not a name on the plaque, but many parties knew where it came from.
There are awesome ways to say I told you so, without saying “I told you, you are not going to make that corner when you said “I got this””.
Money well spent to send a message that nobody else can read.
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I said that mostly in jest. Like most of what I say 
In reality if someone can’t explain it, I will ignore them - in the popperian sense.
[A ‘good’ scientific theory has a higher level of verisimilitude than its rivals.]
That’s all that matters. Everything else be damned.