I have been doing E-juice deals now for going on 8 years and over that time I have been focusing on coming up with unique solutions to forge deals beyond just the price and volume. Below are a few ideas that have worked out very successfully for us at True North Vapor.
Cross Booking:
Cross booking comes from the gambling industry and involves owning a percentage of each other’s action when you are buying into high variance events like tournaments or when playing in higher stakes cash games. The value in this is to still have a second shot at winning money in an event or game if one is knocked out or playing above ones means.
In the e-cigarette market it involves agreeing on an equal number of SKU’s to trade for one another. This has the advantage of eliminating taxation as the invoice to one another can be listed as 0 and can increase both companies’ offerings.
Format Exclusivity:
Often, we look at a product line in a 60ml format, but it is sold to multiple distributors. We get around this problem by licensing the brand and bottling it into a larger bottle that we do retain exclusivity from. This gives us the advantage of selling a product that none else has and distinguishing our reach to our client base. It also helps both companies sell more product as we can send business back and forth depending on the format being asked for by the client.
Warehousing Exchange:
Often, we can mitigate cost of goods with foreign customers by offering free warehouse space to service their other clients while also enjoying a cheaper price over all. This is advantageous to a foreign client as they eliminate storage and management costs and can import much larger quantities reducing there shipping and import fees. It also helps us as we have direct access to product minimizing restock time.
Marketing Exchange:
This idea is simple and involves putting up banners, articles, videos or any other means of communication promoting one another’s business. This is very minimal in cost and helps forge a stronger relationship advertising publicly together. It also opens the door to sharing the cost to advertising increasing the value to both.
Rebranding other lines as “made by the creators of {fill in their most popular brand}”:
The last idea is to take the most famous brand out of say a group of 6 brands from another country and rebrand the remaining 5 as “made by the creators of {fill in their most popular brand}”. This has a combination of bringing awareness to customers about who the creator behind a product really is and leveraging an existing brands awareness to the public. We have most famously done this with Keep it 100 around there 4 tertiary brands.
As always being creative and open minded when doing deals is the single greatest asset you have when negotiating. Thinking beyond price and volume is what it will take to truly reach a business bustling with activity and climbing the ladder of success.
Jeff Berda
CEO – True North Vapor
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