Wholesale Pebble toys for Autumn 2012

Back in the old days Best Years was like ordinary toy wholesalers and sourced all our ranges from China. We also made a lot of toys for well known high street retailers.

We have never had any issues about buying products from Chinese factories as long as you have visited them and take the time to build a commercial relationship rather than chopping and changing suppliers in the eternal search for a cheaper price.

Good chinese factories are effiecient and capable and, if you understand how they like to do business, very easy to deal with.

In particular if they say that they are going to ship the goods to you on 20th of the month, they will ship on the 20th. Ok, sometimes it may be the 19th or the 21st but you get the impression. This is important if you are producing toys for multiples as they tend to fine you if they don't get their toys on time!

It was therefore a bit of a shock when we started working with fair trade workers co-operatives. They might quote a delivery date but in reality this was very dependent on Mother Nature not throwing a wobbly, local politics remaining calm enough not to cause riots or demonstrations and all the workers being able to turn up to work rather than harvesting, looking after sick relatives or any of the numerous things which interrupt life. And all this also needed to apply to the other people in the supply chain as well.

At first this flexibility drove us to distraction. We went from being able to quote a delivery date accurate to around 5 days to not being able to quote a delivery date at all! We had to learn how to do business in a completely new way where there was no certainty or production schedules and nothing you could do or say could influence how long it took to make a product.

Now we have learnt to work with the uncertainty. We hold more stock, place orders further in advance and have learnt how to be patient with new products (although I am not sure Samantha would view us as that patient!)

However all this means that we sometimes get some very pleasant surprises, and it looks like we may get one this week. The new transport toys look like they will ship in July rather than September as we had originally predicted. If you are interested in stock please let us know and we will contact you as soon as stock arrives at the warehouse.

Now all we have to do is locate those errant Llamas....