Everyone who runs a business or who is involved at a high level in a business knows how important it is to make sure you have the best suppliers. Everything from your product appeal to your profit margin to the reliability of your supply is a determined by your wholesale dealer. Before I became involved in business management, I had always assumed that every supplier would be more or less the same. I certainly hadn’t counted on the problems that many suppliers have. If you have never dealt with an unreliable supplier, you would be amazed. You can lose hundreds of dollars of sales every day until you change to someone who will get you your supplies in a timely and reliable fashion.
The wholesale clothes supplier who we sourced for our clothing apparel store came highly recommended. What we didn’t realize at the time was that many of the businesses who had bought wholesale clothes from the supplier were actually owned by the supplier. Although it was not technically fraud to tell us that they recommended the supplier, it certainly wasn’t an honest business practice. As a matter of fact, once we switched suppliers, we contacted many of the other stores that have bought wholesale clothing from them. Apparently, all but one were unhappy with the delivery of the wholesale clothes. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Of course, there were all of the problems that you would expect from an unreliable wholesale clothes supplier. The orders would get mixed up, the warehouse would forget to restock some of the items that we had purchased, they would give us the wrong sizes or the wrong products. It got even worse than that, however. The products themselves were very rarely in good shape. I have never seen a wholesale clothes supplier before or since who actually seemed to vandalize their own product. Perhaps they had disgruntled people working for them, but whatever the reason, many of the clothes got to the store in a very sorry state. By the time we got them, in fact, some of them were completely unusable. We sell wholesale fashion clothes, not chintzy secondhand products. Not only did their shabby service cost us many sales, but even more crucially, it cost us our reputation. When we finally had a reliable supply of wholesale clothes, it took us months to get back many of our lost clients.
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