Oh Canada!

As the days, weeks, months and years keep flying by, we at Jaftex are always seeking out ways to help all our customers thrive.  In the current case, we are helping our Canadian customers, but we are also helping to strengthen our foothold in Canada. Let me tell you about.

Since we bought FreeSpirit Fabrics in 2018, FreeSpirit has been our only company that sold to Canadian customers through direct independent sales reps.  These reps are multi-line reps so they sell FreeSpirit and various other brands with no particular loyalty to one brand over another.  In lots of cases, these same reps work for international distributors too as the Canadian market isn’t as big as the US market and the pool of reps is smaller as well. 

Up to the point when we bought FreeSpirit, all of our companies had been using international distributors.  These distributors either buy the fabrics directly from our overseas mills or directly from our warehouse in the US.  We then ship it to them and they ship the goods to their customers.  This is the same thing we do with all of our other international customers.

After recognizing the multitude of benefits of selling directly into Canada with the FreeSpirit reps, we determined that it was time to test out this concept with the some of our other brands. 

With that, starting in early October 2022 with our newest October release, we are now selling these brands directly into Canada: Studio E Fabrics, The Blank Quilting Corp., A.E. Nathan & Stof of Denmark (a line with distribute in the US).  Henry Glass will continue to be sold through our international distributor Suzi Q Textiles.

Now, I want to briefly discuss the benefits of this move for our company and for the Canadian customers:

• We can now offer better pricing as compared to the prices that were being offered before.  This is a great benefit to the Canadian shops especially in light of the economic challenges that we all are facing these days. 
• Not only can we offer better prices, but I am confident that we will gain market share in Canada quickly.  As shop owners compare our prices to other companies selling into Canada, I am confident that they will recognize and appreciate the opportunity to pay less.
• We will even have the opportunity to break into new shops that might not have purchased the FreeSpirit brand from our direct reps. 
• We can now offer precuts as our international customers don’t often buy that as it is cost prohibitive for them.
• We can now offer specials.
• We will now have a larger audience to offer our promo fabrics to.  This is important to our business as we always need to be moving out older fabrics.
• We can now have more control of our fabrics ensuring that they get into the hands of resellers that fully comply with our pricing policies and respect them.
• The Canadian customers will be able to work with the same dedicated customer service rep that they currently work with when dealing with FreeSpirit Fabric questions and concerns.

We are looking forward to this new opportunity and hope that the shop owners in Canada agree with the reasoning behind this decision.  We hope they see the value of this and take advantage.  I am anxious to see how this plays out.  Stay tuned for future updates on this subject and other discussions of what we at Jaftex are doing to help our customers thrive.