We’re making some key changes to the line of art prints carried by Lieberman’s and wanted to make sure our customers were aware of these changes. In summary, there are three areas of change that are occurring. 1) Lieberman’s will be stocking much more product in house which will be available for same day shipping. 2) While we will continue to carry the entire collection of prints for many publishers we deal with, others we will now only be carrying a subset of their offering, however this subset will be stocked in house for same day shipping. 3) Some publishers will be dropped from the line.
In particular, as of Friday 10/23/09, we will no longer be carrying Bruce Teleky or Image Conscious. We will continue to accept orders for these publishers through the end of the day on 10/23 but will not be able to fulfill any orders from these vendors that may come in past that time. Online customers should remove these items from your databases as soon as possible.
As these are fairly significant changes, I thought I’d provide some background and insight into our reasoning for going this path. Traditionally, Lieberman’s has operated as a wholesale consolidator, combining about 100 different art publishers together into a one-stop solution to buy art prints at wholesale from all 100 of these vendors while paying a single freight cost. As many of you know, this is accomplished by Lieberman’s placing “just in time” orders with all 100 of these vendors every day or every other day (depending on the vendor) to consolidate these orders in our warehouse and then ship them out to customers. However the industry has changed over the past few years making the consolidation model very challenging to be able to fulfill these orders in a way that is satisfactory to our customers.
As you have undoubtedly noticed, the percentage of items ordered which have been found to be out of stock, either temporarily or permanently, has increased to an unacceptable level. We rely on the publishers to tell us when items are not available. While we do get and promptly process discontinued updates from many publishers, they simply aren’t comprehensive or timely enough to keep on top of the growing number of temporary out of stock conditions that exist with many publishers. Further, the turnaround time from our vendors has in many cases significantly increased as many have reduced staff, making our orders take longer to fulfill.
All of this makes our job nearly impossible to carry out in a way which our customers are happy with. This level of out of stock conditions and the turnaround time simply doesn’t work for retailers (our customers), especially online retailers. Many of you have told us how unacceptable these problems are, and we agree. The only real solution is to stock a considerable amount of inventory in house, and make some tough decisions with our vendors. The changes we’re making will result in dramatically improved turnaround time, and dramatically reduced number of items found to be out of stock. While there may be some prints that we won’t carry going forward, for the vast majority that we will continue to carry we’ll be able to do a much better job servicing our customers.
Some of you who have been ordering from Liebermans for decades may wonder how to view Lieberman’s in the industry given these operational changes. I think the simplest way to look at Lieberman’s is as the single largest wholesale supplier of art prints. I believe the “One Stop, No Minimum” value proposition Lieberman’s has built a business on still rings true. No other vendor in the industry offers a selection anywhere near as deep as what we carry, which all ships together with one freight charge, and offers no minimum order requirements. In part what we’re doing is adapting and responding to changes that have already happened in the industry. Printed catalogs are far less common from publishers than they used to be, and many in circulation are quite old. Considering the rate of turnover in what product is available, and the ubiquity of the Internet, we encourage our customers to use our website, www.liebermans.net, as an online and always up-to-date catalog of our offering.
While we feel these changes are necessary in order to run this business effectively, we are sensitive to your concerns and will value any feedback we receive. Also, realize that this is a work in progress. We can’t conquer these issues overnight but will be stocking heavily over the next couple months and you should gradually see the turnaround time and out of stock situation improve. If you are an online customer, we strongly encourage you to process the data feed daily to capture all of these changes in your database. For traditional customers, the www.liebermans.net website will always be updated with the most recent changes.
Doug Kerwin
President
Metaverse Corporation, DBA Lieberman’s
Lieberman's Blog 