In many respects, 2022 was a tough year – and not just for the promotional merchandise industry. The Ukraine war put stresses on energy costs and supply lines; the cost of living (and therefore business) is at a 40 year high; along with double-digit inflation and interest rates marching ever higher.
But looking back across 2022, at Beeline, we also enjoyed a raft of success stories and have plenty of reasons to embrace 2023! This isn’t a gloat. We appreciate that things remain very challenging, and we still feel some of those challenges ourselves. But we also put plans in place and delivered on them. And sometimes, regardless of what’s going on in the bigger picture, it’s important to acknowledge and celebrate your own wins.
We got off to a fantastic start when in January 2022, we joined the Hatters Group of Companies, led by Hatters Promotions - a long-established, consultative engagement agency, based in Stockport, headed up by Jo Shippen.
Jo is well known within the promotional merchandise industry and has built up Hatters to provide branded solutions way beyond pure promotional merchandise, meaning our clients will now have access to a whole range of new services. Although we’re known for promotional merchandise in Birmingham, we can now offer storage and fulfilment using our own warehouse facilities; webshops, which allow clients to see visuals of what they hold with us, call off items for shipment and monitor stock levels; print and production management - from POS to packaging; as well as personalised hampers and staff & customer gift boxes.
Turnover is almost back to pre-Covid levels and we were privileged to have the opportunity to provide promotional merchandise for the Commonwealth Games, held here in Birmingham, last year.
We redesigned our website during the summer and were also joined by Ian Glass, a highly experienced Sales Manager, who lives locally in Birmingham and who’s wasted no time in making introductions all over the city. In fact, towards the end of last year, he joined Jo at the Advantage Group Awards where we picked up the award for Best Website!
Hatters Group are committed to further acquisitions to expand the group and are committed to Birmingham and keeping our HQ in the Jewellery Quarter; the full integration of Beeline is all but complete (tech always takes longer than you think); we have wonderful opportunities to expand our business with new clients and can see us taking on more staff at some point this year. Jo is always available and very proud to be working with the team, here at Beeline. What’s more, the testimonials and reviews have been flying in from so many satisfied clients, both new and long-standing. And that’s why we’re so excited about 2023.
The challenges mentioned at the beginning won’t just disappear overnight, along with the ever-present speculation about the R-word. That said – we just don’t see it. Writing this at the beginning of February, as a group we can honestly say, we’ve never seen a January like it. Between us, we’ve broken all sales records - and we mean, out of the ballpark broken. And that’s saying something after 30 years in business! February is already looking the same way and that was before we’d even got there.
We chose to focus on what we can control, or at the very least, influence, and our drive to improve, expand and deliver quality, branded, print and merchandise solutions for our clients, catapulted us into 2023! And that’s exactly what we’ll continue doing throughout the year and into 2024.
