Electrical Contracting News (ECN) September 2017 | Page 72

SPECIAL
FEATURE
WHOLESALERS & DISTRIBUTORS
MOVING WITH THE TIMES
Electrical wholesalers are the natural route to market for manufacturers – but they can play hard to get,
says managing director of Light Efficient Design UK Limited, Michael Morrison.
E
lectrical wholesalers
should be the perfect
route to market for a
lighting manufacturer
like Light Efficient
Design, which sells
high-quality LED
retrofit lamps for
SON, SOX and general HID replacement.
Wholesalers have strong relationships
with contractors and users, so can help
to get us get in front of suitable and
interested buyers. Furthermore, many
have online ordering facilities, including
trade counter click-and-collect and their
local trade shows are a great way to meet
their customers.
72 | September 2017
Clearly it’s a two-way street and the
more manufacturers can do to support
their wholesalers the better. To this end,
to help build a strong relationship and
communication, we have a national team of
expert sales agents keeping us in contact
with wholesalers and their customers.
Our agents have samples, literature and
displays available for trade counter use. We
can offer a full computer generated lighting
design and, if the luddites out there doubt
the lumen plots, we offer a 60-day trial
programme to show that our lamps perform
as predicted. It is probably worth mentioning
that all of our LM79/80 photometric data
is from actual measurements taken using
lamps running at full working temperature
and not theoretical figures calculated from
data sheets. The alternative is neither
accurate nor honest.
However, there are inevitable
challenges. Even though our US parent
company has over a million retrofit LED
lamps installed worldwide, we – as an
18-month-old UK subsidiary with a
local delivery warehouse for supplying
UK wholesalers with fully compliant CE
products – still find it a challenge to forge
new UK wholesaler relationships. It seems
that our USA wholesaler relationships do
not initially help open doors over here.
One of the most difficult things for any
new player is getting into the accounting
and purchasing systems of wholesalers,