Tales Of A Fourth Generation Textile Executive: Stop The Trash Talking

Growing up, I often heard this from my mom, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”  I too say this to my children because it is one of those sayings that is always spot on. You may be wondering where did this come from and why is this blog titled Stop The Trash Talking?

It recently came to my attention, from very reputable sources, that some people or a person in our industry is talking smack about the Jaftex companies and other fabric suppliers to try to make their own products and company look better.  Not only are they talking smack, but what they are saying isn’t even true.  In other words, they are lying.  To me this is such an underhanded and weak way to try to sell fabric.

When I sell fabric, I sell based on the positive attributes of the products that I offer for sale.  That makes sense, right?  A great design, a popular designer, excellent quality, beautiful projects and so on and so forth. Those are reason to buy a product.  I never put down my competition to try to make my product or me look better. To me, that is just immature and so unprofessional.

At the same time, I believe that the fabric buying audience is not stupid either.  They don’t need me to tell them that this technique of bad mouthing another company to try to benefit themselves doesn’t really work.  In fact, it probably backfires and it makes the speaker look bad and reflects poorly on his company. Moreover, the audience probably wonders about the positive attributes of the speaker’s products because they tend to leave that out by spending so much time bad mouthing others.

I know times are hard people, but let’s cut this nonsense and start calling out the culprits on the spot.  Next time you hear someone bad mouth another company to try to make their own company or products look good, you should call them out and say WTF (WHAT THE FABRIC?).  Not only that, but you should consider not doing business with people who are so unprofessional.  Just saying.

Have a great week.  My big guy gets home from camp tomorrow which unfortunately means that the summer is coming closer to the end.  WAH! Wish me luck.

No Smack Talking Scott

392 words