2010 Challenges and Opportunitities

February 24, 2010 Evergreen Enterprises, Inc. 0 Comments

In 2010 and years down the road, we’ll see further consolidation in the wholesale and retail sectors of home and garden business. There will be changes on every facet of the gamut: room to room lifestyle collections, one-stop shops, back to the roots and back to personal definition in terms of fashion and products.

Retail stores will provide not only solutions but also more characteristics and personality to accompany the brand. You will see very strong niche players with a variety of spectrum. This is an area we need to fortify or leverage through our distribution channels for our retailers to be a whole lifestyle provider.

We owe our success under this economic situation to four founding principles, which stood the test of time and united Evergreen people together.
  • Mobilize as a team to better focus on top line revenue and expenses.
  • Constantly analyze the shrinking pie and try to gain a bigger slice by acquiring competitors.
  • Create a stronger, more marketable value proposition to gain more dollars of shrinking spend while customers are cutting their budget.
  • Leverage our core sourcing ability to create and move more of our best products where we’ve already had a successful and profitable sourcing chain in place.
Our goal is to have an appealing value proposition that not only persuades customers to do business with us, but also offers ongoing benefits of selecting us as their vendor. There are two goals our value proposition in 2010 are based on:  
  • To be the one easiest to do business with.  
  • To create a more transparent ordering process by opening the visual insight to the customer on the shipping status and providing them greater options for connecting with customer service.
Additionally, our continued value proposition is that we are training our TM’s to more of a retail consultant than a sales rep. We are providing trendy and fashion designer items that are more relevant to our retailer’s customers: focusing on merchandising products that will sell in their stores.

Ultimately, the main line in our value proposition is that our customer can relate us with profitability. We partner with them for us both to be profitable. A Differentiator is our special and unique opportunity and selection that allows our customers to be their own differentiator in the market place. To be a niche market with our products that help set our customers apart.

As a matter of fact, there’s actually a great deal that is unknown about Evergreen. We are not known for our soft goods: our kitchen textiles, aprons, placemats, etc. Also, our line of She’s Got Baggage took more effort to launch since soft goods were fairly unknown for the Evergreen brands.

There’s much more capacity on flags; our competency is there we just haven’t developed the strength on the sales side to more largely gain market share in this area. There is still great opportunity in this area.

Another unknown is our line of paper goods: entertainment, kitchen, party, and guest. These all naturally link to our wine stoppers, wine entertaining and more. We’ve linked these together and sell a great amount through gift sets with the wine items, but we haven’t dealt with this line of products as seriously as we need to. We need to offer these products as a separate business, not tagging along as a collection.

I think there are five precious assets inside Evergreen.  
  • Our Distribution Network 
  • Direct Sales Model 
  • Ability to foster and dedicate product selling to a given channel. It generally is expensive, but we’re able to do it. 
  • Our ability to source beyond the normal aging of a relationship offers us more flexibility and the opportunity to build on our successes, allowing us to test products below the minimum. This still provides us with extra margin beyond what is imported.  
  • Our ability to partner with our sales team to see and execute trends quickly.
Each department within every division has been tasked with being more efficient, more forward-focused, and more driven towards excellence. Our practices in efficiencies and profitability in good economic times has weathered us well for the current situation.

Frank Qiu
CEO of Evergreen Enterprises, Inc.

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