Princess Auto

It’s not easy to find good vendors for many of the products we sell in our stores. At Princess Auto we’re always trying to find vendors with the experience and expertise to help us choose products that will sell, but unfortunately that’s easier said than done.

Finding reliable vendors with good products and great customer service who we want to partner with, is not always an easy task – especially when we have so many other things going on in our business that require our attention. Our best suppliers do much more than merely supply us with the inventory we need to do our business – they are also important sources of information, helping us evaluate new product potential, tracking our competition and identifying new opportunities. The best vendors are partners, helping us cut costs, improving product designs and even funding new marketing efforts. If we don’t spend the time to make selecting good suppliers a part of our growth plan, we always come to regret it.

Princess Auto has an excellent reputation for selling a wide variety of tools, safety items, punches, ratchets, electrical items and much more. It’s essential for our business to work with vendors that are aware of current purchasing & retail sales trends and that know what customers are buying today (and tomorrow), how much they will spend and even what kinds of marketing and sales collateral we’ll need.

A good supplier is….

reliable and will ship the right number of items, as promised, on time – they’re stable; and have been in business a long time without changing their line of business every few years. We look to their senior executives to see if they are long-tenured and certainly, we want a solid reputation with other customers as that’s another indicator that the

company is a good and stable vendor. We want a vendor with well-trained employees that can sell and service their products. Last but not least, we want a vendor who is willing to work with us to grow both their business and ours.

Finding a Great Partner means…

Unfortunately it’s not always easy to find a vendor with such a stellar grab-bag of traits. So, when we found GRIP ON TOOLS, we soon realized that we had found a vendor that would be our partner to help us accomplish our sales and marketing goals and build a successful business. Prior to that we had issues with too many vendors that sold us products that weren’t in demand, that weren’t priced right, or had low margins – and most of these vendors didn’t offer POP displays or any marketing support. With GRIP, we’ve had actual, measurable results. Before we developed a relationship with them,for example, our LED products weren’t very good sellers. After 6 months with GRIP, we increased our sales in this category by over 300% with overall profit margins significantly higher.

With GRIP, we solved many of our biggest challenges because they brought us workable solutions. They’re a single source vendor with new and innovative LED work lights and flashlights, patented products, fair prices, better margins, great display racks, superior marketing and customer support as well as a staff that cares. We’ve had increased traffic in our stores, which we can directly relate to a line of GRIP flashlights.

One of the most cost-effective results of working with GRIP has been a reduction in other vendor costs we had previously incurred. The number at the bottom line of the invoice is only the beginning of the cost of dealing with certain suppliers. With GRIP, many problems have all but disappeared because they solved many of our cost issues and saved us a tremendous amount of money in the process of doing business with them. GRIP is a great company to work with and we consider ourselves very lucky to have found them servicing our market. GRIP offers us a wide variety of desirable items and ultimately, they’ve given us the most convenience, customer service, cost savings and education we’ve had from any of our product vendors.