- Thread starter
- #241
How to Find Unique Products
First a little preamble.
Competition is all well and good. Yes it does stimulate the market, but good marketers can stimulate without competition.
When running my own businesses I loved having no competition. How did I achieve that?
The easiest way that I have found is to source from countries other than China. Too difficult? Yes it is a little harder than sourcing from China, but those who do it are moving into the fastlane quicker than most new importers.
Prices are too high? You might pay more for a product than you think you would pay in China, but China does not make such products. They may make jewelry by the ton but they don't make the classy designs that you can buy in other countries. They may make cheap shoes but they don't have the marketability of "Made in Italy."
Those wedded to Alibaba or China in general will find a lot more excuses to not consider other countries, but I know that a lot of my students have done very well by sourcing outside China.
First a little preamble.
Competition is all well and good. Yes it does stimulate the market, but good marketers can stimulate without competition.
When running my own businesses I loved having no competition. How did I achieve that?
- I built a better mousetrap. I saw that in a particular industrial application that I was very familiar with, the product almost universally used had some very undesirable characteristics. Simply put, it had once been the best thing since sliced bread, but I knew that I could substantially improve on it. I did just that ― then I sold it like crazy, charging nearly double what the old product sold at. I achieved 100% market share in my own country, then built an export market. I did not even discount the product for my agents, because the product was so good!
- I found a USP that worked wonders. I was now importing and selling B2B. My biggest local competitor had a 90% market share in the market sector that was the most lucrative. The USP was the word FREE. The complacent competitor charged huge set up fees. I offered FREE set up. It was as simple as that. Like a frog in a pan of water slowly coming to the boil and not noticing the increasing heat, he did not realize what was happening until I had consolidated my grip on the market, and I had 90% of that market. He sold his greatly devalued business to a small competitor, but they never became a threat. I franchised the business interstate and repeated the process, then took my franchise system overseas to 3 more countries where I was able to do exactly the same.
The easiest way that I have found is to source from countries other than China. Too difficult? Yes it is a little harder than sourcing from China, but those who do it are moving into the fastlane quicker than most new importers.
Prices are too high? You might pay more for a product than you think you would pay in China, but China does not make such products. They may make jewelry by the ton but they don't make the classy designs that you can buy in other countries. They may make cheap shoes but they don't have the marketability of "Made in Italy."
Those wedded to Alibaba or China in general will find a lot more excuses to not consider other countries, but I know that a lot of my students have done very well by sourcing outside China.
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