“Pennywise and pound foolish,” is a metaphor referring to British currency, where a pound is worth 100 pence, that literally refers to when someone is careful about smaller things and careless about larger ones.
We have recently encountered a pennywise and pound foolish scenario relating to retail point-of-purchase (POP) displays. Several customers and prospects have been scrutinizing component pricing of boxes, cartons and pallets because they think they may buy them cheaper.
The Gotchas
In today’s marketplace where paper and raw materials are rising quickly, it’s inevitable that customers will try to find lower costs. As a result, we find customers focus on finding the cheapest piece price and not the total delivered cost. Shopping for “cheaper” prices will inevitably result in myriad problems:
- Lower costs will likely result in lower grade or out of specification materials
- Color matching in particular or print quality can suffer from “cheaper” suppliers
- Reduced costs upstream may result in increased transportation damage or other unanticipated costs to fix a problem later
We take a more strategic approach to reducing costs by finding supply chain, transportation and handling savings where available.
Major vs. Minor Cost Savings
If you really want to save money on your retail POP displays, you’ll instead want to focus on streamlining your supply chain. Reducing complexity and risk will generate more savings by reducing the number of suppliers (domestic or international), consolidating shipments and even packing product into pre-packed displays.
No one knows how to streamline the packaging and retail POP display supply chain better than TPH Global Solutions. Here’s a good example. Our approach is to find supply chain savings to offset material cost increases while preserving production quality and execution.
Display Supply Chain Audit
Not sure how your supply chain can be streamlined or how much could be saved? Especially for problematic products, we will audit your retail POP displays and packaging supply chain and make recommendations for cost savings – recommendations that can be implemented whether or not you source anything from us.
This is just one of the many ways you can put our 50 years of display and packaging experience to work for you.
Learn more about streamlining your retail POP display and packaging supply chain
