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I popped into my good friend’s stationery shop recently and, as always, he came from his office to attend to me personally. This time he wanted to show me a new product which he thought was quite nifty – a modern version of the old file separator … you know, those flat cardboard things divided into sections from A-Z into which you filed bills which had to be paid. (Frankly, I thought that in our computer age no one needed such thingies anymore).

Anyway, despite that fact that I quickly advised him that I had no need of one (I shred my bills), he went on explaining how its smaller footprint was a major advantage. He was right – the thing took up a lot less desk space. And it was a light plastic instead of the old thick cardboard which always smelled musty. Bit of colour in there to liven things up, too.  What it meant to me was that if  someone out there was taking the trouble to jazz up an old product and produce it, it meant that there were folks out there who needed one.

So I advised him to take a product photo with his digital camera, plonk it into an email, spell out its advantages, put in a good price, and mail it to all his account holders. I helped him do it right there and then because he’s a grand procrastinator.  Three days later he had to order more stock from the supplier. It’s really that simple – if we have our customers’ email address we can sell to them.

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