Is Your Supplier Of Personalised Pens Your Competitor?

I remember reading a mailing that went out to the trade some years ago with the title ‘Are Your Suppliers Your Competitors?’ Although this was not anything to do with pens, or perhaps I should say personalised pens, the tenor of the mailshot was that if you are a wise distributor you should be careful who you buy your promotional gifts from because they may be connected with an end-user selling arm or may be openly selling to both trade and end-user. It is an irony that very company some years later fell into the same boat themselves.

I remember when reading it that the message could be seen as ‘scare’ tactics and could backfire. I believed then as I do now that I have to live in the world as it is and not the way I want it to be and as long as distributors are making a conscious decision based on the full knowledge of the security issues surrounding passing their customer’s details to a supplier that is ‘running with the hare and hunting with the hound’ then that is their prerogative. In all fairness to the mailshot in question I think the message was a valid one as it was intended as thought provoking.

I am always wary of making claims publicly about issues such as these because a small part of me screams that I am trying to gain advantage by claiming some sort of moral high-ground and I could not reconcile that with my own values, so I kept quiet – like most other people. My general view is that Distributors are capable of making up their own minds and you cannot blame any supplier for trying to sell to whoever they want – that is capitalism and enterprise and if you rob people of that you will also rob the industry of some of its leading lights.

You may at this point wonder why I am bothering to write this news item, apart from the obvious one of putting important keywords relevant to promotional pens in here and there (…see I’m at it again), well it is because I am beginning to notice a very worrying trend – that of the seemingly trade exclusive supplier selling to the end-user through ‘cloaking’ companies.

That will be the subject of my next article in pens.co.uk – The Home of Printed Pens, so keep tuned in.