GNS years ago set up a comprehensive category system mainly for their website. It is used internally.
The problem to us is that they never released it to the public. Several of our clients stuck with the old GNS/VNS standard, some adopted one of several other stationery companies’ category system while others went ahead and created their own.
However many had nothing and wanted something!
Say they wanted to know - How are our scissors selling now compared with last year? It is not so easy to find out unless you want to go though several different items and then do some manual addition.
Our interest is of course these newsagents as we wanted them to have category analysis.
After many months of meeting, discussions, emails and some test trials we meet GNS today and they have decided to release their category system. No doubt it will be a challenge for them to adopt categories made for themselves with their wholesaler needs and those of their newsagents’ clients.
Some fine details are still to be determined but I cannot see any reason for it not to happen soon.
The main advantages to the newsagent is that it will be easier to organize their stationery stock, find it on the shelf and it will provide you with a new level of reporting. At no extra work for you!
It will enable you to better manage and understand stationery performance.
