An early morning office chat turned to how things have changed for the retail and display industries over the years. We soon discovered it’s a topic that could easily turn into a very long chat indeed – too long to transfer to a blog post and expect anyone to read anyway – but here’s a summary of a few thoughts.

When you think of retail in general the biggest change during our time in business has to be e-commerce and online buying platforms. That was the game-changer back in the early 2000’s but now new technologies are being developed at an astonishing rate and consumers are at a stage that they adopt them wholeheartedly.

The ways in which retailers and shoppers interact is continually changing almost to the point where our computers and mobile phones seem to know what we want to buy before we do! Retail marketing is a whole different ball game now, but it is all very exciting.

We are often asked whether all this digital media is a concern for a company like us who rely on printed material and honestly the answer is no, not really. Quite simply, there will always be a place for printed literature. There are still times when people like something tangible. When the likes of Google and Facebook – two of the biggest online giants – use printed literature and retailers the likes of Next and Argos still print catalogues it says a lot for the power of paper. This is something we’ll pick up on in future posts.

In terms of our business things have changed in a number of ways over the years. We have obviously seen cheaper, low quality products from the Far East come and go and make varying impact in the market but the trade and consumers increasingly acknowledge that there is a balance to be found between quality and price. Cheaper is not always better, which is why many imported items don’t make any real headway in the market now.

We sell exclusively through distributors and so don’t have our own web-shop, but it has been really interesting to see how web-shops have played such a huge part in boosting sales in many different markets. During the early heyday of web-shop openings it was often possible to look at sales figures for various European markets and know instantly which distributors had launched a web-shop – it really had that much impact in many cases.

Right now it seems that print marketing is having somewhat of a comeback. Perhaps email marketing and alike are looing their imact?… perhaps customers want that tangible factor again?… we’ll no doubt look at this in future posts too.