Spent a leg aching day yesterday walking around the majority of the exhibition halls at the NEC, Birmingham, looking for anything new in the canal and campervan ranges, and as far as the general gift manufacturers are concerned, campervans are more popular than canals.
The only items new for the canals that I spotted were a few jigsaws, so they should be appearing in the catalogue in the near future. Plenty of stands had campervan stuff, keyrings, fridge magnets, clocks, cushions etc.
The main problem for both canal & campervan stuff is that it represents a very small part of the range offered by the company, and quite a few of them have minimum order quantities and costs that are £250-£300 or higher, and just spending that amount on the few items that you want means that you would have to buy more than you really want or could sell in a couple of years. So unless you can find a wholesaler that stocks these items then you don’t stock them.
The downside of the wholesaler stocking them is that every other shop on the waterways etc., is also stocking the item, so you don’t have something different to everybody else.
The 2011 catalogues haven’t appeared from the waterways’ wholesalers yet, so I don’t know what new stuff they may have come up with.
As always, prompt, polite and courteous service and advice. Many thanks, Neil