Issues 19: Designer labels

DESIGNER LABELS

WHAT IS IT about designer labels? There’s a handful of Big Names we happily pay way over the odds for, even though we know the actual product is made in a Far Eastern sweatshop. All we know for sure is that designer labels mean Big Money, either for the maker, the retailer or the buyer.
Funny that, because Windowbase has been saying it all along. And not just Designer Labels, but Fabricator Labels, Installer Labels and Specifier Labels, too. A play on words to get your attention? Not really because, like Designer Labels on clothes, there’s another market that pays a tenth of the price (at the most) for Dead Ringers. And before you read on, is that another play on words?
One of last year’s award-winning window fabricators has its own list of window companies. It contains over 20,000 names. This is one the country’s acknowledged leading players yet, according to its sales and marketing setup, there are over twenty thousand window suppliers out there. So you see what we mean about Dead Ringers.

The odds are that, for every ten calls made to names on that list, there’ll be no reply from six of them. And if those aren’t dead ringers, what are?

LESS IS MORE NOW, THERE’S A CLICHÉ, if ever there was one. In the example above, surely you don’t need to be Brain of Britain to work out that a list of 20,000 names isn’t going to achieve much, apart from supplying someone with a job for life, cleaning it to less than half the size.

And how long’s that going to take? More relevant is what the company - and we’re talking Major League here - is going to do in the meantime. Keep ringing? Actually, no. What they’re more likely to do is take the position that lists of data on the window aren’t of any use. Close, but no cigar.

What they would actually be saying (but find it difficult to believe) is that THEIR list isn’t any use. To compound the problem, if their list is so out-of-date to be that big, what they don’t know is how many going concerns aren’t on it. It’s all very well playing with statistics but what they don’t know - can’t know - is whether their database contains anything like the 8,500 actual companies that really are out there. The odds are, as everyone outside the company can easily work out, that they haven’t done anything like enough cleaning over the years. And if they’re that inefficient at wiping off all the dead ringers, we can’t have too much hope in someone else being efficient enough to ensure that all the new ones get put into the database.

It would be foolish to do it, because that would be sticking good stuff in with rubbish. One thing’s for sure, there’s no sense in adding anything worthwhile to a list of 20,000 names.

LESS IS LESS WHY PAY OVER THE ODDS for clothes (shades, trainers etc) with the right label when you can go on holiday and pick them up for next to nothing? A nice young lad in a Venice street can offer you a Gucci handbag for less than a tenner. Well, he starts at £75 but you can get the price down. He’ll take anything if he sees a copper coming. Funny that. Maybe it’s from a consignment of stolen gear. What we can say for sure is that a pavement seller’s margins can’t be THAT much less than the shops.

As of last month, there are far less users of Windowbase data than there were last year, and you can work out the reason before you read it. Hookie gear again. In a way, it’s a bit of a compliment but nobody ever heard How many of us would leap at the chance, walking along the marina at Puerto Banus, to get our hands on a nice British Home Stores cardigan at less than half the price? Exactly! If we’re going to shell out for something cheap, it’s got to be for something we want.
So a great big Thank You to everyone who valued Windowbase data enough to buy bootleg copies, and our apologies for being mean enough to pursue the guys who were flogging them. Mean of us? Absolutely not, and just about everyone knows it by now.

MORE IS MORE ALL WINDOWBASE DATA, be it fake or genuine, now contains information unique to the original customer. Just a little bit more information, but enough for a bootleg to be traced, just as unique as the registration number coming up on screen when Microsoft-ware is loaded up. This protects a lot of interests, primarily the customer’s.
If someone’s paying for top-quality data, they don’t want one of their salesmen doing the rounds, offering “one last thing while I’m here”. Flogging an employer’s data to others, who could well be competitors (or just as likely to flog it on to competitors), is biting the hand that feeds them. It happens and, if it happens again, be assured Windowbase now has the ability and the incentive to track it back to the source, plug the leak and even, if necessary, get the police in.

When you pay for The Real Thing, what you don’t want is to find that everyone else has the Fake Thing for a fraction of the cost. Makes you feel like a mug, and we don’t want that, now, do we?

HELP FROM YOUR FRIENDS

I GET BY WITH A LITTLE help from my friends. Now we’ve established that anyone flogging fake Window-base data is doing nobody, except himself, any favours, and that, in a roundabout sort of way, our credentials are being established.

The reason folks want Windowbase data is that they know it’s streets better than anything else. If a systems company wants to tell the world how well they’re doing, they quote Windowbase as the source (in last month’s Window Industries, actually).

It doesn’t have to be data on disk. Sure, that’s the direction lots of companies take in the end, but plenty start out with a set of regional mailing labels. Trade fabricators, or fabricators looking to maximise trade sales, take a couple of sets of labels with a follow-up list. Dip a toe in the water, and all that. Instead of shelling out a few grand a year, better to start small - £200 at the most - and see the results.

Labels get used. That’s why they’re purchased. If they get used properly, they bring results. Windowbase can’t spell the message out - we can only ensure your message goes to the right people. If you have something to say to installers who buy their windows from Company X, or using Profile Y, you can have the labels for precisely that message.

What’s more, you CAN get a little help from your friends. Your system supplier should be your friend or, at the very least, your partner. More and more systems suppliers are waking up to the fact (and it is a fact) that, to sell more profile, they need to help their fabricators win new work. They are helping their customers to win more customers. It’s called Pull Through.

So, if you want to send the right sort of message to a selection of prospects, ask your systems supplier to help. You shell out a few quid and they do the work, often with just the sort of professionalism you worry about being able to demonstrate. Makes sense, doesn’t it? They have bigger budgets and far more experience in dealing with media and mailmerges. All they do is contact us, agree on the charge for regular mailings on behalf of their fabricators and, with a bit of luck, everyone’s a winner.

Well, not everyone. Mr Get Rich Quick, who’s been trying to flog disks isn’t a winner but he was never going to be, was he? Just your bog standard chancer who spotted what looked like a gap in the market in the mistaken belief that he’s smart, and can’t get caught.

SPECIFIER LABELS

LET SOMEONE ELSE INSTALL is the very sound logic behind trade windows. Let them have all the problems on site, if that’s how they want to earn a living. The trouble is that lots of installers are a bit small. Taken over the year, they do enough business with you but it’s lots of little orders when what YOU want is a handful of big ones.

Why not let a few local authority DLOs do the installing, then? Think of the advantages. They order enough at one go to keep production going for a month. They pay up on time. They don’t go bust, leaving bad debts. Money for old rope?

Well, no, actually. There’s not much of a market for old rope. Money for good windows, though. Any trade fabricator, especially with a BBA or ISO 9002 certificate, can get some very real help from his systems supplier, in much the same way as hitting retail installers. Hell, they’re just installers. The only difference is they have half a dozen teams, working flat out installing windows (okay, to their specification) but a few thousand at a time. YOU might not know what to write to these people but the odds are your systems supplier does.

DO ME A FAVOUR

AS IT GETS HARDER and harder to find new customers (it’s hard enough keeping the existing ones), you can come direct to Windowbase or you can enlist the help of your profile supplier. Nobody expects you to put your name down for thousands of pounds’ worth of data on a disk. It’s far more likely you’ll be after a couple of sets of labels to try out. And the all-important follow-up list, to help the response rate.

Hit our website and play around with some figures, print out quotes, that sort of thing. We’re at winbase.co.uk and on 01706 644308. If you’re professional enough to have the right product or service, we’re the professionals who your system supplier probably came to for their data. They know it makes sense. And now you know why it makes sense.