“That is the best launch we have ever had”

In the scope of a partnership, PF Concept and the Spanish textile specialist, Gorfactory, have been working together since January 2024: PF Concept has expanded its textile line-up to include products of the renowned Roly brand. As such, the customers of the Dutch importer can now also acquire a wide selection of basic textiles directly via the PF web shop. Pieter Boonekamp, Managing Director of PF Concept, spoke with eppi magazine about secret truck convoys, impressed trading partners and the inevitability of digitalisation.

Mr. Boonekamp, one day before the PSI Show you surprised the market with the announcement that you are entering a strategic partnership with Gorfactory. The news caused a stir within the industry. As a full-range stockist, what was PF Concept’s motivation to cooperate with a textile specialist?

Pieter Boonekamp: Quite simply: We wanted to significantly expand our offer of textiles. In addition to the higher-priced segment that we cover with our own brand Elevate, we wanted to also offer our customers entry price point products. However, certain demands exist for this market segment regarding the depth of the range, selection of colours and one has to be a specialist to satisfy these characteristics adequately. PF Concept used to be such a specialist – with our brand US Basic we were among the industry’s textile pioneers in the 1990s. We also introduced Slazenger as a retail brand for the promotional market and were one of the main players in all price categories for years. However, at some point in time the market demands changed: offering decoration became increasingly more important and in the course of this shift towards full-service, we concentrated on our textile brand, Elevate, that was introduced in 2012. Elevate stands for textiles of the medium to high price bracket, for good customising options, high-quality design and sustainability. However, we want to cover our customers’ complete textile needs again.

With its brand Roly, Gorfactory is an absolute expert for everyday textiles and the company is unparalleled within the industry in terms of inventory size as well as the depth and extent of its product range. Hence, we complement each other, can strengthen each other and grow together – and PF Concept will become a one-stop supplier for printed promotional textiles again.

Why are you betting on a partnership instead of building your own new line of textiles?

Partnerships are often a wiser option than take-overs or investments. The textile sector requires a lot of capital to provide the necessary warehouse and inventory to the market. A partnership is a way to optimize resources in a context of excess capacity in our industry, with huge stocks everywhere. How many white T-shirts are needed to satisfy the demand? Until all these shirts are sold, it is just capital that is stockpiled, which is at great risk of landing in the garbage.

The cooperation with Gorfactory entails you offering the Roly brand to all your customers, including a customisation at PF Logo Express in Poznan.

Exactly. And it is based on mutual exclusivity: Namely, Roly mostly sells non-customised goods to textile wholesalers, distributors and printers, whereas PF Concept focusses on reselling customized Roly products to the distributors. We are the only pan-European partner for Roly on the promotional products market. We have access to all models of the line-up, but have initially selected around 40 top-sellers that we have in stock in Poland, so that we can dispatch them the next day already customised – with our “One Day Print Service” from Poznan we offer the fastest turnaround in our industry. That is the scope of our cooperation so far, but it will be extended even further.

We already have a wide range now – with a very large selection of products at entry-level prices through to the industry’s first recyclable jacket from the Elevate collection. What’s more, all services are provided under one roof. It is thus as equally simple for the customers to order a decorated garment as it is to order an imprinted notebook.

Together we supply the whole of Europe – with its warehouse in Andalusia Gorfactory above all focuses on Southern Europe; we have warehouse capacities in Central Europe and Great Britain, and our sales team in every country supports the customers in all the relevant languages.

What do you expect from the cooperation with a view to your market position?

We want to become the biggest supplier for customised textiles in the industry very soon. Unlike many of our competitors we have sales people, who are very experienced in the textile sector.

Incidentally, we don’t compete with textile wholesalers or embellishers, in other words with the customers Roly sells its non-customised goods to. Our USPs are very fast decoration services, digital sales channels, certifications like GOTS and GRS and high supply chain transparency. Hence, we do justice to the reality of today’s market: Nowadays, the majority of promotional products distributors want to order their goods online as simply as possible. There are very many small-volume orders in the textile segment, which aren’t really worth a distributor investing time to organize decoration or shipment. He might prefer to talk to a pure printing specialist personally when it comes down to very big and complicated orders. That is why we can all live well together on the market. Textile wholesalers are a different story altogether: In terms of different products and brands they offer everything a market has to offer with very fast fulfilment and of course without an imprint – and they don’t really care which brand they sell. We invest in two brands – Roly and Elevate – and we further develop them, know them very well and will further develop them with all our dedication. That is our position on the market.

Gorfactory has a big warehouse in Murcia, Spain whilst the central hub of PF Concept is located in Poznan, Poland. How is the day-to-day logistics handled?

We transport stocks from Spain to Poland weekly so that they are literally stored right next to the machines used to imprint them. That means we also deliver the customised products to France, Spain or Italy from Poland. Many distributors are long since used to ordering printed textiles from PF Concept in the same manner as other products.

You offer a good dozen different customising technologies. Are these also all available for the Roly products?

Yes, whereby some are more suitable, others less for the respective item. But basically we offer all benefits and services that our customers are familiar with.

These include not only being able to see at a glance online which customising technologies are available, where an item can be imprinted and what the whole thing will look like, but also the stock levels and how long delivery will take. How difficult was it to implement this process management for the Roly range?

The actual quantity of products and SKUs that we added to our collection proved to be the real challenge: we added over 5,000 references over the weekend and wanted everything to be ready from day one! But our systems and processes proved strong and we can pass on real-time product information and a live order status to the customers every second via our web shop. We will gradually increase the number of products we carry in stock in Poznan.

What is more important in this respect – the breadth or the depth of the range?

In the value segment – Roly – we need a great depth of range in terms of the colours and sizes, of course, and we hold the largest stocks in the industry. However, what differentiates us from a wholesaler is that we offer a sensible collection, where all of the items complement each other – and not only the Roly and the Elevate collection, but also the items within the respective collections. “We select with care” is one of our brand claims. This makes searching easy for our customers.

Sustainability is a very important point, especially for textiles. In what way does the cooperation offer you the possibility to support each other regarding sustainability strategies?

Roly will of course profit from the knowledge and experience that we have gained due to our long-standing sustainability activities. For us the basic prerequisite for every product we sell is that it complies with all regulations and laws that apply for sustainability. And these constantly change and become stricter – take the digital product pass (DPP), for example that is to be introduced EU-wide soon. However, we have advanced very far here – we have been providing extensive information on the sustainability of each of our products for years, including full access to documents that certify the compliance. We increasingly work with trackers in the textile sector, which allow the path of a garment to be verified. We want to support our customers in making their supply chain more sustainable – and that is also one of our brand claims. Because we are convinced that precisely such measures are necessary to further professionalise our market and further improve the image of haptic advertising.

How long did it take to set up the partnership?

The preparations took over a year – among others every product had to be tested on the printing machines and photographed for the web shop. Dozens of lorries drove from Murcia to Poznan. That really was a mammoth task – but everything was ready in time for the launch and the customers were able to place their orders online from the very first minute, which they actually did as well: We received the first order on the first day!

How did the market react otherwise?

Many people were indeed very surprised, because they hadn’t expected such a move. The next surprise followed then when everything really worked from the onset. I must praise our team – not only for making everything possible, but also for keeping it all a secret for so long. We wanted to achieve a wow-effect on the market and we certainly succeeded – which considering so many people were involved definitely wasn’t easy (laughs).

But apart from the surprise effect, what happened next was very positive for us: Hardly anyone had any questions, because most people knew what it was all about – and many people reassured us that the partnership is a logical step. The response and the sales figures are exceeding all our expectations. In February we had already sold new products in every European country we operate in. We are far ahead of the schedule and are thus able to plan the next steps sooner than expected. In short: That is the best launch of a new service or brand we have ever had.

In 2021 you took over the British specialists, T Shirt & Sons and made the first move in the direction of print-on-demand. Among others that was a reaction to the trend towards smaller and smaller volumes. Is the partnership with Roly another piece of the puzzle in this respect?

We have a lot of plans on the table, but I can’t go into detail here yet. However, print-on-demand is booming and will take the industry by storm over the coming years. At the moment print-on-demand is mainly still end consumer-oriented, but we are working hard on building a bridge to the promotional products market. There are many interesting touchpoints for distributors and users to sell items via print-on-demand mechanisms, however the right digital infrastructure is necessary first. Distributors can’t earn any money selling individual items, if they have to operate an offline model, even partial. Everything has to work fully-automatically and dock on to the customer’s system.

Which further developments are you expecting for the promotional textiles market in future?

Beyond product-related trends, the really radical developments are occurring on the process side – the way products are marketed, visualised and sold will change drastically. Digital tools will become more and more important here.

What are the dominating themes at the moment when it comes down to digitalisation?

We have invested massively in efficiency and automation over the past years to simplify the order process and the customer journey for the customers, but also to relieve the back office in the course of our growth. If all goes well, everyone can concentrate on his core business. In the meantime around 80% to 85% of the orders are placed purely online.

Is that a new trend?

It has developed constantly, but we have meanwhile reached a level where only very complex orders are processed offline. But what really has changed: Five years ago the majority of the customer enquiries were related to the orders and transactions, whereas the customers don’t have to ask us any of these things now because they can call up the prices, the stocks and the order data online, so the customer service staff can concentrate on sales support and customer care – whilst at the same time we have entered a new phase of digitalisation.

Which means?

It is now about inspiration for instance, about helping distributors sell more and generate more demand: We make tools available to them that allow them to put the right products together for their customers and their purposes faster or using simpler means, i.e. 3D visualisations, mood boards or different media to inspire their customers without having to fall back on graphic or agency services. As with all topics to do with digitalisation the problem arises here – across the entire industry – that many different applications are available on the market, as well as many different software solutions and interfaces. More uniformity would be better, otherwise simplifying and standardising things often goes hand in hand with a loss of quality, because one has to agree on the lowest common denominator – and the service suffers significantly here. So, we try to provide the best possible visualisation software in our own shop – and when I look at the download figures there is obviously high demand on the market.

In addition to visualisation we also invest in AI, which will be a game changer for our industry in the future. Corporate shops that are operated by distributors on behalf of their customers are a further big trend – a difficult theme, because they entail high costs which in turn makes it hard to achieve a good margin. This is where we come into play by making our shop interfaces and fast printing services available. But one could hold an entire interview about digitalisation.

PF Concept has a very wide spectrum of customers. Does the fact that you are so well-organised digitally make you especially interesting for the large promotional products agencies with multinational accounts?

We focus 100% on the promotional products distributors, and are open to all of them whatever their structure or size. We actually offer the larger ones a very attractive model – we can realise drop shipments everywhere, we guarantee compliance in all fields, we have state-of-the-art systems, which the customers can integrate into their ERPs. At the same time, smaller trading companies also operate corporate shops for industry customers, but they don’t have the means to set these up themselves and that is where we come into it. We always try to think in customer segments and offer them the best respective solution. Which brings us back to the theme “partnership vs. investment”: For a time, some distributors integrated services that were actually more typical for suppliers. But that costs a lot of money and sometimes one wins over big accounts, but one can also lose them too. So, today many distributors prefer to use their supply chain.

And the international business literally has its limits, because there is no such thing as a global product. The regulations, trends or consumer habits are too different. So, when customers ask us whether we can help them with their business in the USA for example – that is where our parent company is based, the Polyconcept Group – we can do that of course, by establishing the contact. But the actual business is carried out locally.

Back to Europe: What is your opinion of the European industry’s current position? In spite of the multiple crises we are experiencing, the mood seems to be really good?

In times gone by, experiencing just one crisis had a serious effect on our industry. Now we are feeling the force of several severe crises at once – wars, supply chain disruptions through to the troubles in the Red Sea, inflation, deflation – as well as numerous new regulations that are having a huge influence on the market. But it looks like the industry has the resilience to assert itself against all of these difficulties. Contrary to the macroeconomic trend, our business is doing well. PF Concept in particular already got over the pandemic two years ago and 2023 was our best year ever in terms of turnover. I think the situation is similar at other companies on the market and that makes me confident because it underlines the fact that haptic advertising has proven it has the right to continue existing as an important advertising medium – even in a very challenging environment.

Till Barth spoke with Pieter Boonekamp.

photos: PF Concept