Inventors How to Keep Retailers Buying

{Don Debelak’s new book, Turning Your Invention into Cash is now available on Amazon for $3.49. Go to Amazon.com and enter inventions Don Debelak to purchase. From the author of Entrepreneur Magazine’s Bringing Your Product to Market.}

Inventor Story: Jamey Bennett

When you have one or more really good retail chains buying from you for a few years, is there any way to keep them from switching to a copy-cat product that costs less?  There are no guarantees in retail sales and some retailers will drop you if they find a lower cost product no matter what.  But some retailers are more concerned about giving their customers the best products than offering them cheap products.  Once such a retail chain starts buying from you, you should work hard to build a good relationship with them that will keep them buying from you, even when low-cost copy-cats are everywhere.

Jamey Bennett has worked hard on building such relationships and let’s take a look at what he does.  Bennett invented a new book light called LightWedge which is an illuminating clear plastic sheet that lays on top of the page you want to read.  The LightWedge is a vast improvement over more traditional lights since it only illuminates the page you are reading and Barnes & Noble quickly signed on to sell it.

Now, LightWedge has grown and there are lots of new designs, but there are also thousands of other competing products, many of which are just cheap knock-offs.  Bennett combats this by never showing up at Barnes & Noble, or any other major retail store he sells through, with a finished prototype.  Bennett shows his customers what he is working on and takes suggestions.  He gets them to buy into his new product and when they see their suggestions in the final product, they are quite excited and since they feel pride in the final product that they helped create, they are not very likely to replace his product with a cheap knock-off.

If you want to keep your retail buyers loyal to you, you have to be loyal to them.  Take time to meet with them, get their input and give them lots of reasons to buy from you.  You may end up developing different products for different chains, but that is much better than having your product replaced by a knock-off.  Go the extra mile and you can create buyers that will keep on buying from you for years to come.

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