An interesting comment on the Stainless Fastener Market
"With the retirement of Dave Hirsch from Vertex and the withdrawal from daily operations of Wayne Golden from Star, an era of leadership in the stainless fastener business has come to a close-it remains to be seen what the results of these firms will be without the leadership of such outstanding professionals." - Mike
This was sent to me as a comment from "Mike" but I thoght it was worth being repeated as a new post. Thanks Mike.
This was sent to me as a comment from "Mike" but I thoght it was worth being repeated as a new post. Thanks Mike.
TS – The players perform at an impressive level for a long period, begin to get on in years, we honor their past achievements, and then we get back into the game. The entire fastener distribution model underwent drastic changes over the preceding decade and a half. It’s difficult to say which came first; the fading away of those iconic industry figures from the early days, or the shift in philosophy that now has every distributor running an inventory replenishment program to service their OEM base. In any event, the two continuing processes appear to correlate with one another. As Albert Einstein once said, “Nothing happens until something moves.”
Most of the big import supply houses took this change in distributor marketing strategy as an object lesson and attempted to focus their own application of it towards the domestic distribution market. Vertex has been toying with various supply program ideas for years, all the way back to when Joel Roseman still worked there and Mark Alperin held the title of COO. Brighton-Best and HTI both tried similar strategies, offering yearly contract pricing and automatic replenishment to those distributors with a sufficient turns to satisfy some internally calculated benchmark. Star Stainless chose to ignore the trend, in part (and I’m only guessing here) because Wayne didn’t like the math and he called the shots.
So now, as we bear witness to an impending importer war, one in which the major players are mostly unknown or untested in this type of contest, we will soon see who emerges from the fray as the next iconic figure in the industry. I don’t see any particular favorites yet, but I guarantee, whoever it is, that the winners will be lifted above the rest on the power of a simple idea that is embraced by a customer base currently struggling to maintain market share and margins.
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hi,travlling salesman, I have browsed your blog,it is professional, I would like to know is there any forum for fastener distributers or buyers? then we can fine more business there? Many thanks.
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OK, WE HAVE BEEN TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHO YOU ARE. DO WE KNOW YOU?
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Not sure. Where do you work (because you say "We" are trying to figure it out.?.?
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Are there any Stainless vendors out there besides Star, Brighton, and the other well knowns??
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