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Views from Across the Pond
Monday, Nov. 21, 2010, 5 p.m. EST
Thinking Outside Can Include Gathering Global Ideas
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Blog post and photos by Trevor Cole
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| Checking the quality of pottery products in Vietnam |
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| Workers apply the glaze on ceramic pots in Vietnam. |
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| New use of slate products for tableware, commonly used in the French market |
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| Selecting fancy goldfish in Shanghai, China | I just returned from a trip to Vietnam in search of pottery. It was an add-on itinerary to my main trip to attend the annual Canton Fair in China and to visit extablished and potential vendors. At 53 years old, I just added country No. 53 to my list of travels.
There’s something to be learned from every country, and for the past 20 years or so my travel focus has been with business in mind. I started importing aquatic/water gardening products when we started our first retail venture in the late 1990s. We could not source what we needed, so we decided to import. At that time, almost all of our imports came from England, my native country. The English already had a mature water gardening and koi industry so product was easy to source.
About 10 years later, we opened our new retail store and diversified considerably. With tough competition and reduced margins we decided to use our importing experience to our best advantage. My first visit to the Canton Fair was in 2007. From that trip I established contacts to start building business relations with potential vendors. Equally important to making those contacts, I got to see in one place all kinds of new products and get an idea of the trends forming around the world.
Travel consistently spawn new ideas for us. When I see a new landscape trend, I can hybridize my ideas with concepts from different cultures.
A customer recently sent me a picture of an unusual water feature he saw in Germany. From that idea, I sketched my own version and produced a technical drawing of my vision. My local suppliers said it would be impossible to translate into a finished product. During my last visit to China, I took that idea and showed the picture and my drawings to some of the companies I visited. A couple of them have taken the initiative to build prototype samples for me. They are accustomed to the challenges of implementing other ideas and because they produce for a worldwide market; they have the experience to turn an idea into a reality.
Global manufacturers have a different perspective of tasks presented to them. I will return to China to check the prototypes and fine-tune the designs. This is all part of our effort to the think outside, which is our company slogan. We strive to be unique, interesting and always have something new and different to offer our customers. This practice keeps customers coming back for more, and they want to see our new ideas.
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