Wholesale Manufacturer Looking to do Retail

by tawmus
2 replies
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First post , and I'm looking to get some thoughts about the path that I've been working on recently.

My family owns a small leather goods manufacturer in China. We are a boutique firm that specializes in hand-tooled leather products and western leather products, and we manufacture for several companies based in the U.S. and Japan.

What I've been working on, is our own retail product line that can be sold direct to the customer through our ecommerce site. At some point, we plan to sell wholesale to retailers, but I'm trying to setup the site to establish the brand first. I'm currently using Wordpress with Woocommerce for the website.

I'm not entirely sure how I will proceed once I have the website completed. Since we do mostly wholesale, it would be better to sell wholesale, but I'm not sure how to attract buyers without starting small and growing the brand first. Any manufacturers out there with experience similar to mine?
#china #manufacturer #retail #wholesale
  • Profile picture of the author webwide
    We evolved into something like this in my last business. We had an online nutrition company which created a branded line of supplements. Then we created a wholesale line with a different brand that we did not sell online. We then approached people who had our type of customers, weightloss doctors, womens products, etc to carry our wholesale line.

    By having the established brand we were able to create a retail price that worked well for the offline retailers.

    If I may ask, what is your current site and more specifically what type of leather goods are you looking to market?
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    • Profile picture of the author tawmus
      That's an interesting approach, it brings to mind another issue I have with another company, where we offer both wholesale and retail sales through two separate websites. I'm assuming by creating another brand for the wholesale portion, you were intending to prevent the cannibalization of the retail sales?

      The site that I am currently in the middle of revamping can be found at dev2.fremontartisan.com, and the older site can be found at Fremont Artisan Company. We intend to market hand-tooled leather belts, wallets, and other small accessories. A lot of the hand-tooling found on the market have a very strong western influence, and although we've created many western-style leather products in the past, we're looking to go a bit more modern with this new retail line.
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