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The Successful Gift Basket Packer
The successful
gift basket packer knows his/hers clients
as well his/hers suppliers. Most gift basket packers know their clients.
They know all their domestic suppliers well. But they have difficuty
understanding how the baskets
are supplied.
That is because all the affordable
baskets are made in countries where labor
is still cheap. Even in these countries, only people who live in the most
remote and inaccessible
areas are willing to perform the work. City people, even in the third world,
do not work on basket making.
Therefore, the most difficult job we are facing
is to bring the baskets from where they
are made to where
they are used.
Nobody can stock
all the baskets under one roof.
Regardless how many baskets we have today, they can be cleaned
out by one customer in
one day. Since our supply
line is so long, we will be out
of this basket for a while.
As a gift basket
user, it is important to know who you
are dealing with and how reliable
he/she is.
Before Coe & Dru established our own subsidiary
in China, we were buying baskets from the government
owned exporters. We got great prices.
But we never
had any communications.
Chinese Government employees never answered
our request. After placing an order, we'd never know when could we expect
our merchandise. Sometimes it took six
months, some times nine
months to
receive our shipment.
Now we are different.
We have our own subsidiary
in China. Our employees there have to work
to earn their living. We communicate
with each other all the time. We know the progress
of one particular basket. If we make a promise,
we deliver.
The baskets are made in the remote
villages of China. But we have skilled
designers
in Shenzhen
who specialize
in making samples. When you give us your requirement, we can normally have
a counter sample
made within one week.
And we bring in the baskets
from those villages
to our warehouse in Shenzhen
in private trucks,
not through the government owned railroad
system. We may pay a little more in freight,
but we control our own destination.
Shenzhen is
as civilized as
any major city in the world. Tens of thousands
of ocean going containers
cross the border to Hong Kong
each day. Once we have loaded our containers
in Shenzhen,
we know exactly where our merchandises are.
It rarely takes us more than 90
days to deliver an order. Very often,
we can deliver our goods in 75 days.
But it is impossible
for us to deliver in 60 days. If
you have a need in 60 days,
please select your baskets
from the inventory
in Los Angeles.
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