| In 1998 Panda introduced the groundbreaking version "A" catalog,
a 168-page book that spawned Panda’s syndicated catalog
program and created a new market in the safety industry.
Safety Source, Inc. and Colonial Industrial Products were
two of the 18 distributors that had the foresight to participate
in that initial run.
Safety Source, Inc. was in just its third year of existence
when President Keith Skipworth concluded that working with
Panda would benefit his company.
"In order to have a catalog that presented itself well,
we needed to have a nice professional look, (including) color
and pricing," explained Skipworth. "To
do that individually would have been in the price range of $75,000. We
were a three-year-old business at the time and couldn’t
justify that. We didn’t
have a staff to lay the catalog out, find the right part numbers and make
sure the products were up to date. Panda handled all of that."
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"(The syndicated catalog) is a great tool.
It's a tool that we definitely need and it's a tool that
would have taken a lot of time and money to produce if we
would have done it on our own."
--Richie Reggiani
Colonial Industrial Products
Initially, Safety Source, Inc. and Panda discussed the possibility
of creating a fully customized catalog. But in the end the
syndicated Panda catalog offered what Skipworth was looking
for at a cost-effective price.
"It wasn’t fully customized, but (the version "A" catalog)
was a good representation of the products that we had," added
Skipworth. "It accomplished what we wanted to do."
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Safety Source, Inc., located in Alabama, has
been providing the Gulf Coast with a wide range of industrial
safety products since 1995.
Richie Reggiani thought that the syndicated catalog program
sounded like a good idea, so the president of Colonial Industrial
Products South in Deerfield Beach, Florida signed on. The
catalog program has proven valuable for the industrial safety
distributor.
"It made life a lot easier. It saved us printing costs
and time," said Reggiani. "We started from the
beginning. Basically it’s a great tool. It’s
a tool that we definitely need and it’s a tool that
would have taken a lot of time and money to produce if we
would have done it on our own."
Colonial Industrial Products, based in Florida, has been
in business since 1988, and services an area from "the
Cape to the Keys" according to Reggiani. The distributor
also exports to South America and several Caribbean Islands. |
