Honesty in the Corporate Gifting Industry

The fight for website ranking is high. Once a week I check the corporate gift ranking to see where we are situated. The Google search for corporate gifts reveals at least 115,000,000 results per day. It is mind boggling how quickly a good ranking can change and a lot of companies get good ranking for corporate gifts as they are paying for certain spots. But how do you know that your corporate gift company can deliver the goods. Over the 12 years that Belle Regalo has been in business, we have earned a reputation for meeting function deadlines. When a client has a clearly communicated function deadline for corporate gifts, then we pull out all the stops to meet that corporate gift deadline. We are honest with clients about what they can expect. For example one of our clients wanted Moleskines as corporate gifts for a function. There is only one importer in South Africa who has the licence for Moleskines. Which means that the entire country’s Moleskines has to comes through same importer. Having sold books for many years as corporate Gifts, Belle Regalo knows this very well. The Moleskines are imported from Italy. Once Moleskines arrive in the country, then they have to go through customs and the Moleskines enter into the country via the Durban harbour. Sometimes customs lets through items very quickly and some spot checks are done. However when as a country we are expecting possible crime when it comes to major events, then customs sometimes checks every single container. For example around the FIFA World Cup customs was expecting fake FIFA shirts and so started inspecting everything and that is how they uncovered the fake shirts. Back to our Moleskines as Corporate gifts. From day 1 we communicated to our client that the Moleskines were due at a certain time, but that ETA was dependant on customs. As luck would have it customs did a check and slowed everyone’s orders down. We let our client know that we could offer then unlined Moleskines in comparison to lined Moleskines. They were not happy with this and then found another supplier and asked us to send their refund for their corporate gifts to the other supplier. Now as we know that there is only one licence holder to import Moleskines, we also know that if we cannot get the Moleskine stock, neither can anyone else. Moleskine in Italy has very strict contracts about what can or cannot be allowed for the importing and distribution of Moleskines in South Africa. We communicated this to the client and asked the client to make 100% sure that the supplier had the physical stock at his premises to supplier. We also got additional enquiries from Moleskines for the exact same specs as our client and when we enquired the brie was being sent by our competitor. After investigation our client found out that our competitor in fact did not have the stock and was also waiting for customs to clear. We pride ourselves on being honest with our clients even though we know that some competitors get business through lying. For us the long term relationship is more valuable than fast money that comes with deceit. The end result was that the client realised that although they did not like the answer that we gave them, it was an honest answer and in this industry trust is an extremely valuable commodity. The client took the unlined Moleskines and we are privileged enough to receive future referrals to other clients from them.