As If I Didn’t Have Enough On My Plate Already (Part 1)

To say that I am busy these days would be an understatement. Work and life are quite exhausting and time-consuming, now more than ever. I keep thinking, dreaming and wishing, if there were only more hours in the day or if I just didn’t need to sleep as much.

And, as if I didn’t have enough on my plate already, there are people out there that insist on finding their way into my business to consume me with their negative energy and cheating ways.

Allow me to elaborate with two examples of how people are wasting my time, energy and money by forcing me to have to deal with their unsavory business practices.

In the first example, a consumer in Canada contacted me to let me know that she found our FreeSpirit fabrics in some Canadian stores. That you would think is fine because we sell FreeSpirit in Canada through our direct reps. However, the bolts had a different company name on them (I can’t name names at this time due to legal issues going on).

Since we don’t use distributors in Canada or the US for FreeSpirit Fabrics, the company name must be on the boards of all bolts that ship from our US warehouse to US and Canadian customers. That is when I realized, “Houston, we have a problem!”

After doing some research, I learned that the person selling the fabric was a jobber. A jobber is someone who buys odd lots of fabrics at cheap prices and sells them off a.ka. an undertaker. The Canadian jobber, through his Korean agent, bought a container worth of leftover prints from various Korean mills. Go figure, but this included FreeSpirit fabrics from some of our most well-known designers.

The Canadian jobber proceeded to double and roll our FreeSpirit fabrics and those of my competitors. He put them on his boards and sold them into the Canadian market just like that.

The worst part is that he sold the fabrics to retailers that were our legit FreeSpirit fabric customers already. Under this scenario, the shop could have the same fabric on the FreeSpirit board and another on the board of the jobber. Talk about awkward! Moreover, the prices could be very different since the jobber is selling at a significantly discounted rate. Also awkward!

Our Canadian customers should have known better. It would have been very nice if one of them brought this to our attention, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. Now it’s going to be annoying for them as they are going to have to locate all these illegit bolts and return them to the jobber to be destroyed or returned.

Now, I am forced to have to deal with this from my end. I am also being forced to have to work with lawyers. As a law school graduate, I know good and well that no one really wins when the lawyers get involved. At this point, I don’t have much more to report except that I am working on this and hope to get it resolved soon. The good news is that everyone is cooperating and not denying they did anything wrong.

Now I want to tell you about the second incident, but you are going to have to come back next week when I continue with part 2 of “As If I Didn’t Have Enough On My Plate Already.”