Tales Of A Fourth Generation Textile Executive: A Beginner’s Guide To Swatchcards
An integral part of selling fabric is the fabric samples and swatchcards. With respect to samples, there are a couple of options that I will discuss below. Some companies print their fabrics up front (i.e. before getting orders) and show all of their lines on fabric. This is a really nice option as you, the customer, know exactly what you are going to get. On the other hand, it might be a complicated way to manage inventory for companies that sell that way. Without boring you with the minutia of selling this way, the problem arises when reorders need to be placed and minimum order quantities need to be achieved.
Using a simple example, if the initial order placed on a pattern is sold out and the company has to go back in to reorder to cover additional orders of say 400 yards, the problem arises because the mill requires an order of say 1000 yards. Therefore, there is the potential to have 600 yards of closeouts which drags down margins dramatically, if not totally. In there lies the crux of the problem.
All of our quilt shop only companies (Studioe, Henry Glass & Blank Quilting Corp), on the other hand, sell off paper on what we call CAD (computer-aided design) cards. Essentially these are printed selling boards. We mock up the cards on the computer and send them to a company called Swatchcraft who ultimately prints the cards for us and distributes them too. One of the most difficult aspects of producing the cards is matching the colors. As you can imagine, you don’t want to find out that a line you thought was red was really pink.
Our team spends a lot of time color matching the cards so that customers can feel confident that they are actually getting what they paid for. At this point in the game, being that we have been selling this way for many years now, customers understand how this works and have confidence in our color matching and our fabrics. In any case, I always tell people that that fabric looks better than the paper and it feels better too. As for the feel of our fabrics, the majority of our goods are printed in Korea on 60×60 cottons and most customers can feel confident about the product they are getting from our companies.
The reason we prefer this method of selling is that it allows us to sell the lines for anywhere between 5 and 8 months before we ship the actual fabric. So for example, the lines that we just showed at the Houston quilt market in October will start shipping starting April next year. That gives our reps a long time to sell the fabric. When it is time to place our orders we have built up a nice book of sales. We then take the total number of sales and buy a percentage of backup fabric for reorders. The upside to this is that we don’t have an exorbitant amount of closeouts. Moreover, we are what people call “one and done.” That means that we print the lines once and typically don’t go in for reprints. This is what we have found works best for us and we are sticking to it. Hope it works for you!
What do you think?
Until we meet again.
Scott