SERVING ALL CHANNELS

Valentina Circo and her management colleagues at the Italian promotional products distributor Cipi obviously had the right intuition: “We have carried out a restructuring process over the past months – we have turned a company that sold products into an organization that sees and positions itself as a service provider. This process already began before the economic crisis, but of course it is helping us to combat the currently unfavourable market conditions enormously.” Valentina Circo explained.

Valentina Circo

Up until now Cipi’s strengths lay in product sourcing, design and the customer-specific creation of promotional products. In Italy Cipi acts as both a distributor and an importer, thus already serving the market via two different sales channels. Now, a thrd sales channel is being developed in the form of the “MyGift” project: The recipients of promotional products. The concept is already established in the Netherlands and Germany, but in Italy it is still new: Cipi compiles a catalogue containing premiums for an industry customer, the industry customer’s client – i.e. the recipient of the premium – can choose his product from the catalogue himself. Cipi takes care of the presentation (catalogue and website), the entire product procurement process, warehousing, order management and logistics on behalf of the industry customer. Furthermore, as of late Cipi’s division “Cipi Solutions” also offers companies the specialized and individual planning and handling of customer bonding and incentive programmers, corporate merchandising collections and other areas that companies want to outsource.

Moreover, thanks to Cipi’s new web shop verbavoglio.it, the sales channels are now completely exhausted: It is a spin-off of the B2B web shop cipi.it and is a sales platform on the consumer market in the form of a B2C tool.

- Source  (http://www.my-catalog.at/37483_eppi69/ , page 56)