Things were progressing well. Our hand-picked team of designers had started their initial training and were being introduced to our procedures and chosen tools. These were going to form the base of the disciplines that would allow us to set our quality controls, and standards. These were the standards which would define us in the future...
But we all know how it works: not everything goes as planned in life, and our first setback was waiting in the wings, just waiting to try and trip us up: You may have remembered from an earlier episode, that I'd decided to hand over the retail distribution to the experts: in fact, we'd been talking to the world leader in the distribution of pre-paid products, and we were set to join their winter product roll-out.
They loved our concept, and the timing of our launch coincided perfectly with their schedule.
But, when “push came to shove”, we came up against a problem we hadn't considered. Canadian retailers had had limited time, and opportunity, to test the market for lifestyle products packaged in a gift box. The bad news was that they'd decided to give the first ones they'd installed in their stores more time, before deciding whether to accept similar products on their shelves. That meant us! So when our distributor brought us the bad news that we weren't being accepted in the key stores until there was proof that the Canadian shopper really wanted to buy gift boxed products, we had to re-think how we were going to get our services seen by the people who needed them...
It was time to add another, very important job to my list!
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