Compete on Design: Musical Instruments Division

Recently a drummer contacted me about a certain material for the brushes drummers use for certain effect.  The to import them.  The perfect brush he found by taking apart a housewares item.  That housewares item was overstocked in a big chain.  Instead of importing for now, his best bet is buying up the overstock to rework into his ho-selling product.

Only a passionate professional drummer would have gone through that problem solution.

Now here is a problem solution story:

For decades, McMinn has supplied the guitar industry with wood grown from the Columbia River to Alaska. He runs Pacific Rim Tonewoods, a small sawmill in Washington’s North Cascades. It has become one of the biggest wood suppliers in the country for musical instruments. Each year, McMinn ships to America’s biggest guitar makers hundreds of thousands of soundboards (the top of the guitar body) made from Sitka spruce.

So he has a small sawmill and a niche market, that demands a certain design.  For example, here is one of his customers:

Guitar makers like Tom Bedell take their wood sourcing seriously.
“I personally get involved in the entire supply chain,” said Bedell, who runs a guitar company in Central Oregon. To ensure the legitimacy of his wood suppliers, Bedell travels around the world and visits their operations in person.
He recently launched a “homegrown” guitar series, generating one-third of his sales on guitars that use domestically-grown wood like Oregon's myrtlewood and oak.

So enough of the right wood is a problem...  and there are people in the field who work on a solution:

Another solution may be growing in McMinn’s backyard: the bigleaf maple tree. The hardwood grows prolifically in the damp forests of the Pacific Northwest, but very few develop the beautiful wavy grain that guitar makers want, known as “figure.”
“You find it very rarely in nature, and we don’t know what the cause is of this figure,” said Jim Mattsson, tree geneticist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.
Mattsson had a hunch. In Finland, scientists found that a similar defect in birch trees was genetic and could be cloned.
So last year, Mattsson and McMinn teamed up to study the genetics of figured maple trees. Mattson’s lab began taking cuttings and using them to grow new trees in baby food jars.
Next year, when the trees grow large enough, Mattsson and McMinn will transfer them to 50 acres of farmland in Western Washington’s Skagit Valley, where they hope to create a figured maple plantation.
“I hope in the long term, people around the world will come to the Pacific Northwest to buy figured maple,” McMinn said.
It could take at least 10 years before the trees reveal whether they’ve developed the wavy grain. But figured grain in maple trees may be triggered by environmental factors like bacteria or fungus, Mattsson said.

This reminds me of the ski manufacturer Vokl, which has its own forest to get the wood core perfect for their skis.

When I share theses stories, there are countless who respond, "Great trade lead! I am going to trade in "figure" maple!"

No, you are not.  Without passion, you'll never compete in guitar board trade.  With passion, you'll overcome every problem and stay in business.

Tje most important thing is business is the customer, but the hardest thing, indeed the only difficult thing, is getting the product right.  This is just one more of the countless stories about people putting their efforts where it matters, getting the product right.

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Online Exporting Food Seminar

You want to make your own money?  You ready to be self-employed? You have no money, contacts, experience, and not much time?   How do you get from where you are to where you act on practical results - finding suppliers and customers.

Using what resources you presently have, in this seminar held online for one hour per week, for four weeks, you will be taken through four steps: establishing rationale for buyers and sellers to work with you, create your LCL MOQ FOB offer and no-nonsense competitive website (forget everything you know about websites), find and approach buyers directly with your offer to sell, and then act on practical results.

Forget everything you know about exporting, you can break all the "rules": you'll go for the smallest order rational, not the largest possible; you'll leave all of the "localization" problems on your customer; you'll get prepaid.

You will learn the tools, tactics and attitude to trade professionally and work with the top freight forwarders on the technical issues.

The course will run Tuesdays, 6-7pm Pacific Time, Oct 11-Nov 1, 2016.

This seminar is like no other, and has been hosted by industry associations and leading schools.  The feedback is stellar. Learn the tools tactics and attitudes with food that can be applied to any product form anywhere to anywhere worldwide.

Go into the Fall with a new skill.

Sign up now, no need to pay now, you will be billed to pay at your leisure.  This is a special unannounced session, so go directly to the enrollment page and scroll down to the enroll now/pay later form.

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Traceability Vs Clean Label

We must never let a government make definitions, for they render them incomprehensible.

Market researchers tell us that consumers are seeking ‘natural’ products more than ever – and ingredient suppliers have responded by providing ways to ‘clean up’ product labels – but what do these terms really mean?

Since the word organic has become meaningless, and people care, now the idea is "clean labels" which work to be specifics to what the given food has gone through.  Well, take that desire to its apotheosis, traceabilty.  The QR code what takes the consumers smart phone to a page that not only has a quick video on the entire process of the food in question, but further affirms that particular unit that the customer scanned is legitimately from the source.

In all specialty products "provenance" is key.  With traceability you can build loyalty with provenance. Right now companies offering traceability systems are charging too much to do too much.  When someone comes up with the right offer, I will highlight them here.

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End "Fair Trade" Now!

Here is a fellow who from the trenches discovers what specialty trade has meant from the beginning...

Above all we remain focused on quality and consistency

Exactly, or "pack consistently to grade" ...  "Quality" means nothing, since Walmart has a quality level and Saks has a quality level.  The trick is to establish what the level is, not "insert a buzz word."  And then make sure everytime the box is open that grade is in the box.

Mexican coffee growers are way too polite to use rude gestures, but what do you think they said when I suggested that they pay to become "Fair Trade" certified?

The same thing when a group of Ecuadorians were told they should introduce microloans to their villages.  "It is a trap."

The USA destabilizes vast swathes of the world, and communities that functioned for millenia are degraded and then the perps show up with a "plan."  How about a different foreign policy?

How about we disband our military and business people show up with a purchase order?  We pay trillions in taxes so Dick Cheney can show up overseas and tell people what to do.  How about we pay nothing in taxes and I show up with a sketchpad?

I have to disagree with this fellow on the point that Fair Trade efforts raises customer awareness, since he makes a point we in specialty small business have always known... there is a premium on quality.  I think he is being nice since his customers no doubt believe in "fair trade." Instead of creating a sinecure to be funded out of grower profits, the best way to "raise awareness" is to associate the grade with the cup of coffee a given person is drinking at a given money.  Logos, halos, whatever do not do the trick.

As I learned forty years ago from people who learned it where they first worked, compete on design at the specialty level.

I've complained about fair trade before...

There are two other points this fellow is rocking if you nose around his website:

1. Finance along trade lanes... credit along the trade lane is necessary to recovering small business international trade.  He is doing this.

2. Traceability...  he offers it as authenticity, but I see it as trumping the violent interference of the state in trade with the IPR of trademarks.  Strike one for freedom!

When Fair Trade showed up in the 1980s it was clear it was another progressive collectivization, sinecures with a halo, a program to pick winners and crush losers, that would get co-opted by the big boys putatively being fought.  Mission accomplished.

It warms my heart as people with no relation to me, never heard of me let alone took any of my classes, come to the exact same conclusions of what needs to be done concretely.  It means we are making progress.

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Traceability and Big Business

Sigh.  I mentioned here when progressives criticized Walmart for not buying more from small business, Walmart turned the criticism into a money maker off those companies they turned down anyway.  Of course Walmart turns every critique into a profit center.  They are expert in feeding demand and making money off of it.

The progressives turned their sights on Unilever -

So here we are into the world of perverse incentives.  To achieve “100 per cent traceability” Unilever has decided to cut the number of smallholder farmers who supply its palm oil – by 80 per cent, according to Gavin Neath, senior vice-president for sustainability. He told a conference in London earlier this year that it was “a cull… to ensure standards”.   It was not he said, that the smallholders were bad guys, but that for a large corporation they were untraceable and therefore a risk.
Klintworth admitted that the rest was “a trade-off” in which social concerns lost out to environmental ones.  The result is a greater reliance on large palm oil plantations and a further turn of the land grabbing screw – all in the name of green ethics.

Since progressives relentlessly lose, and since they make money off the game, just playing the game, they too have a perverse incentive (moral hazard in economics) to continue to play and lose.  Big biz loves the outcome.

Small ag traceability is cheap and effective. Big ag traceability is irrelevant. Unilever enjoys taxpayer funded anti-knockoff law enforcement. Small producers should not be selling palm oil to Unilever for soap, they should be making soap.  They can link to google earth to assist in traceability, along with other cheap and effective means. Sulawesi’s All Natural Plantation Soap would be literally on the map.

We know how to get the soap to overwhelming and profitable demand, so that is not a problem.

It is standard corporate response to take a criticism and study how they can leverage the criticism into more power and profits. Strategy: never criticize big business. When Shell Oil becomes a “green certified” company you lost, you did not win.

Asking bigbiz to do the right thing is to ask a wolf pack “what’s for dinner?”

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