Important trade buyers of pet care products will be travelling from The Netherlands and Sweden to meet with British suppliers at the PetQuip ‘Meet the Buyer’ event to be held on June 19 at the export association’s head offices in Brasted, Kent.
Garden product buyers from Germany, Finland and Sweden will also be meeting with UK suppliers from the garden sector.
The one to-one format of previous events has brought glowing testimonials from UK suppliers and overseas buyers in recent years and has added significantly to export sales for the participating companies.
Quotes from British suppliers include: “The meeting was very successful and the buyer immediately said that they would stock our new product for next year. They have now placed an initial order for 10,000 units” and “We have not failed to get a new export customer from every ‘Meet the Buyer’ event we have attended”.
Similar accolades received from the attending buyers are: “We have added 21 new British suppliers to our customer base as a result of recent ‘Meet the Buyer’ events” and “I only expected to do business with one or two companies prior to the event but I was very impressed with the suppliers that I met on the day and now expect to list several products for full distribution and for my online shop.”
The pet product buyer from Sweden is from Granngården, a retailer with 109 outlets, specialising in items for the outdoors/countryside lifestyle and a wide range of pet products.
The company also operates a mail order catalogue and a web-shop. Its customer loyalty club has 700,000 members. The company is seeking to broaden its range of grooming, pet care and other pet items.
Looking to source products for The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg is AnimalFactory. The company is an importer / wholesaler of innovative, functional, high quality accessories for dogs, and supplies independent pet shops, vets, grooming parlours, pet physiotherapists, hydrotherapists and car dealers, along with a large number of web shops. AnimalFactory has experience of importing from the UK.
In addition to a pet product buyer, Granngården will have a specialist garden product buyer at the event, and other garden buyers will be Gärtner Pötschke, the German specialist mail order company, and Tarha-Tuote Oy, a Finnish importer/wholesaler.
The meeting on June 19 is open to members at a subsidised charge; non-members of PetQuip or Gardenex are also welcome should places remain. There are still some appointments available but they are booking up fast so interested companies should telephone either Charlie Parker or Eleanor Wigram on 01959 565995.