Selling to Retail Shops

[JIMMY C]

Hey everyone. I am a photographer and I have decided to start selling my products wholesale to retail shops. I print my images on a variety of mediums such as Cutting Boards, Mugs, Magnets as well as your normal 8x10 / 11x14 matted prints. I live in Florida and It's "The Season" right now and lots of the snow birds have been buying my smaller items at the Art shows I do on the weekends.

SOOO my dilemma is that I know I have a good product and they are selling but my biggest questions is when selling to retail do you need to give tables, stands, etc to the shop that will be selling your products. I know every shop is different but I will be selling to Gift Shops mainly and I'm curious If I should buy a Magnet display for the counter and Standing Rotating Picture display for my prints, and also a small rack or easels for my cutting boards. Thanks, I'm all ready to start going to the shops but want to make a good first impression and know exactly what I have and how it will fit into their store. Thanks Jim

[SumpinSpecial]

Ideally, yes, you should include a POS display. If you like, you can charge for it instead of giving it away for free, or you can bundle it's cost into your wholesale product cost. Up to you.

The benefit for doing this is to ensure that your products are displayed the way you want them to. If your branding is important to you, or you don't want your products mixed in with other/competitor products, then having your own POS display is a good idea.

[extramile]

Ideally, yes, you should include a POS display. If you like, you can charge for it instead of giving it away for free, or you can bundle it's cost into your wholesale product cost. Up to you.

The benefit for doing this is to ensure that your products are displayed the way you want them to. If your branding is important to you, or you don't want your products mixed in with other/competitor products, then having your own POS display is a good idea.

Yes it's a good idea to do this, because it would be a shame if they sold your items in a way that wasn't so glamorous. This way, you can control how they look.

[JIMMY C]

Thanks, Now do I need to put into a contract and say that The display items are for my products only or somehow have them pay back a certain part of the display. It looks like each Display may cost me around $150. Or Suck it up and just let them Keep out and be thankful they are selling my product

[SumpinSpecial]

I wouldn't make it a separate contract, but just an additional paragraph on the order form/invoice. You'll need to weigh the pros and cons of either making the display a separate line item that they're clearly paying for, or bundling it's cost into the invoice total (dividing it up by the item count and adding it to the item price).

But aside from that, I wouldn't have the paragraph say anything about how they must use the display. You can't really control that. Ideally they'll use the display for your products only, but you can't force it unless you go to their shops to restock like food suppliers do at grocery stores.

I'm new so my experience is limited, but I did buy a display "tree" from a vendor last year. She provides innovative harness/leashes and the display tree is designed to display them hanging off the "branches". What I actually use it for depends: if I vend at a greyhound event, I use it to display muzzles (from other vendors), if I vend at all-breed/all-species events then I leave the muzzles at home and use it to display the harnesses as intended.