TheRodinhoods

To Vend or Not to Vend…

Hello Everyone,

This happens to be my first discussion thread after being in the group for quite a while, and reading everyone’s stories and solutions from fellow rodinhooders. 

A little introduction of myself – I am Vikrant Joglekar from Mumbai. Professionally, am working with a global MNC in their marketing team. Passionately, I am a photographer, and been doing wedding photography.

My passion, i.e. photography involves me to deliver not just photos to the couple, but even printed albums (which would be lifetime memories for them!)

Since the albums need to be outsourced (i do not have a printing press to print the albums), I have been getting in touch with different vendors who can provide me those services. 

On one such occasion, I choose one reputed Vendor, whose brand has been in the markets since ages. Trusting the brand and the quality attached to it, I took them onboard to deliver “printed albums” to the couple. The Brand mentioned, they would take the designing part as well, thus taking another load off my back.

When it came to delivery, surprisingly, they had not even started with the album design 1 month after collecting the images. And their sales guy, instead of trying to understand what the customer wanted, began to think other way round and thus things got stretched. Today, its been almost 3 months, and after lot of emails, calls/ whatsapp (the couple are based in USA after marriage), the album finally got final approval. I felt some relief that the album would be going for printing.

But to my horror, the final print came out poorer than the samples they had shown me and the couple, before we decided to go with them. 

Now they are trying to get someone from their quality department to speak with me, but what they do not seem to understand is the TIME myself and the couple have lost in all this golmaal for one album…

Have not dealt with such vendors before, and this episode surely is putting me off from pursing my passion. I prefer to deliver quality to my clients rather than lame excuses, but again, I can’t serve half cooked food to them.

Would appreciate if anyone can help me out how to deal with these vendors.

Thanks,

Vikrant