The Importance of Keeping Business Relationships
Working at Ubiq has shown me what it’s like to be considered the “client”. What I mean by that is various businesses come to the store and vie for the attention of our buyer, managers, and staff so that they can bring their product in and onto our shelves. Companies such as Sebago and Adidas go to great lengths to keep the buyers and staff pleased .
Sebago’s rep and our good friend Cody recently stopped by the store to show us a new 2012 Sebago Collection in the works — a collaboration with Filson Leathers. Websites within our industry haven’t even gotten word of this collaboration yet. To be one of the first eyes to see this product outside of Sebago was truly an event. Not only were we allowed to preview what was to come Spring 2012 but we were given sample pairs as gifts.
Sebago is not the only company to treat its ” top clients” with preferential treatment. Adidas recently invited some of the staff to attend the Footprint Summit at their New York City offices for the bi-annual Footprint Summit. Footprint is the division of adidas Originals that offers up something unique to the customers. The bulk of what we carry from Adidas on our shelves at UBIQ is Footprint product.
Their offices are conveniently located on top of their SoHo store. That row of windows above the “all in” campaign banner is where we got down to business.
As you might expect from adidas, there was a multitude of inspirational moments from their past creations lining the hallways of their offices.
The Footprint cast of characters was represented well with almost every store in attendance, including Concepts(Boston), Major(D.C.), Wish(Atlanta), Mr. R’s(Miami), Packers(Jersey), Nicekicks(Austin) and David Z.(NYC). To those of you who are not familiar with these store names these stores are either listed as Tier 0 or Tier 1 (according to Nike). Tier 0 is the highest Tier which will allow your store to receive the best and most sought after product from shoe companies. Ubiq is a Tier 0 store.
The main point of the summit is to promote discussion about new product. Everyone checks out what’s in the pipeline for next year, and then analyzes what’s selling now and what they think will be selling next year. You get to experience everything a little ahead of time, and you can interact with your peers to (hopefully) make those products even better for the customers. Here’s a quick sample of some of the things we saw:
The trip was resoundingly productive, and inspiring. We’ve got some very exciting things in the works with adidas, such as a possible collabaration and I think Footprint will make some noise in the coming months throughout the industry.
