Rant - Suppliers Selling Finished Goods, It's Competition?

[Johanna]

Bruce is right about:

It has kind of been a natural progression in both directions for some of our suppliers. They go or have gone from manufacturing to a supply division or vice versa from supplies to manufacturing.

Weaver has been selling finished goods (and they will gladly sell you some at wholesale for you to sell) as long as I can remember. When I worked for Tandy 20 years ago, we got to tour the Eversman Pkwy facility. Everything was made there, too, from dye to lace to and Craftools. The "finished products" were the kits and belt blanks. Springfield Leather sells finished goods and supplies. So does Zack White Leather. Have you seen a Crazy Crow catalog lately? There are some people who want to do the work themselves, there are some people who re-sell and need inventory, there are some people who like kits and then bling it out, there are some people who are going to pay $15K for a designer handbag made out of plastic. I don't see a conflict of interest.

However, you should call Weaver and tell them they should be advertising here.

Johanna

[Art]

Weaver had been selling their tack line for some time. We sell it in the tack shops I am connected with. There are several reasons. First, I could not custom make the volume we sell at our shops. Second, even if I could make their tack line, I could never compete and pay the product liability insurance that comes with the Weaver (we also sell Jeffries) name. Hell, they aren't going to sue me when they do something stupid, their lawyers are going after Weaver. Weaver is filling a niche that I simply can't, and I make a decent markup on it. And Weaver only sells to brick and mortar (well boards and nails in our case) tack shops. Some of our customers can barely afford to board their animals, much less pay high prices (it seems to them) for custom tack, the Weaver line sells very well.

I generally don't buy uncut leather from Weaver. I feel there might be too much temptation for them to cherry pick the leather for their own use. For my own use, I use Belgian, English, and German hardware, Weaver (and Tandy who they cooperate with on buying) tend to provide Chinese stuff. The quality is OK but not great on Weaver hardware.

So, don't shun Weaver because they sort of compete with you, use them, order some of their product and mark it up, that's what you are supposed to do. You will still get custom work, but you will also make money on the customer who really doesn't want custom tack, why have them walk out the door and spend nothing?

Art