http://www.promotionalmerchandiseblog.co.uk/">Our Impression – The Promotional Merchandise Blog from LSi

I’ve decided to burn all our promotional merchandise and corporate clothing brochures with immediate effect….. obviously I haven’t discussed this with our MD yet!!!

More and more I worry that a brochure pigeon holes us to what is in the brochure and this worries me because our industry is so vast. I say with no exaggeration that our business is amazing, we have over a million products to offer but more than anything we want to offer a solution and no brochure is ever going to offer that.

If I asked 50 customers if they wanted a brochure to choose a product they thought might work OR speak to a specialist who can advise them on what has worked for others and more importantly what hasn’t worked then I know 50 people would want the latter and that’s what LSi is based on.

We’re not sales people – we’re advisors and we only want the best for our customers because we want you to keep coming back for the next 50 years.

So for any customer that’s reading this – feel free to throw all and any brochures you have in the bin and put 01274 854996 on speed dial.

Instead of talking about clothing or promotional merchandise I’m going to rage about something that happened to me this weekend…the purchase of a fireplace. Not a fire just a fireplace.

My dad told me to go to a discount fireplace store as it was cheap…so I did. I bought a fireplace I was happy with with their delivery date of the following week. That following week no fireplace – I had to call them to find out it was a week late. One week later they came to fit it. This was a weekend in November, it was cold, wet with leaves all over the floor. Did the fitters put down sheets and take their shoes off when in my house – NO. I had to ask them to after my carpet was nice and marked. It doesn’t end there. When I bought the fire I asked if I could have downlighters in and they were happy to take another £100 off me for this. They never thought that with the downlighters in unless I had good depth to my fireplace my fire actually wouldn’t fit…which it didn’t. Then the hearth should have been 15″ depth and it came at 18″ depth and I accepted this but they had to cut my carpet to fit it. They messed this up totally and when they were fitting the electrics I realised why – I asked them which one of them was an electrician and both were joiners….not electricians and not carpet fitters. The fireplace went back and I hoping for it to be delivered this week but I will now have to fit it myself because I have no faith in the company and I don’t want them in my house BUT because they have ALL my money up front I’m stuck. It’s a long winded story I know but it’s 100% true and I blame myself. I was greedy and instead of paying the right price for the right product I accept that I’ve got the right product I wanted but I’ve bought it cheap and ended up with cheap service, people who have no idea what they are doing and the finished product had every chance of looking cheap once fitted by Mr Bodge It. This reminds me of this industry and the people who play at it. We are the specialist in what we do and we do it right. I totally accept that we are not the cheapest company out there but we’re the best and after my experience I want to distance myself from the word and feeling of CHEAP.

If I could do it all again I’d pay the right price and be happy with the finished result.

It seems like every time I come on here I’m trying to preach something or moan about something….well nothing has changed – please see below….

Everything I hear lately is bad news, every other week there is someone linked to this industry going out of business, we’ve seen one of the largest gift houses go under in the past two years along with a lot of smaller ones. This year we’ve seen an increase in these companies going under and it’s very sad to see, many people have been put out of a job and many of our the manufacturers we use have been left with bad debts making everything more difficult for the rest of us.

We’ve always felt that we’re at the top of the game, not that it protects us but the companies we deal with are always very loyal and we offer such a good service I feel that we do very well in bringing on board new business. I’d say we’re the Marks and Spencer’s of promotional items – you pay for what you get with us and I don’t mean this in a big headed way, I’ve worked here for 10 years so I’ve competed with the good and the bad so I know what I’m talking about. It would be easy for me to leave LSi and start up my own company working from my bedroom undercutting the whole industry but the minute something goes wrong I’m washing my hands of the problem because I can’t afford the problem. I always talk about this and use the example of travel insurance because I travel a lot. When I go to a price comparison site and give them the info of the trip and it comes up with my cheapest option at £7 and then the more expensive companies below – I have never bought the £7 policy – I scroll down and I buy with confidence with a brand name I can trust so that if god forbid I break my leg on holiday I have total confidence my policy will cover me – pick me up and get me home.

This is how I see LSi – the brand name that WILL have problems on a job over the years we trade with our customers but WILL also put the problem right.

I can tell you all day long about how LSi is a sound choice and you can buy with confidence from us and how we’re not going to go out of business but it’s just words. If you want to trade with us speak to me or my team, we can put you in touch with customers we’ve dealt with for 10 years plus and you can speak to them directly about who LSi really are.

The sales team has been pushing the upcoming LSi Big Promotional Gift Show for the last 5 weeks and although we’ve had some great success, more and more we’ve had the objection that customers just cannot spare the time out of the office, time is worth more to people than ever before…. this got me thinking.

This industry is just like lots of others – we have the good, the bad and the ‘just too expensive’. But unlike lots of industries our product range is massive, if we want a promotional pen we have fifty thousand to choose from, if we want a promotional umbrella there are thousands out there.

Why waste your time speaking to the bad and the too expensive. Speak to the people that know what they are doing…. the people that will save you TIME.