We’re happier with the pursuit of excellence rather than the pursuit of bigness

pop-up cubeHere’s the 9th in our series of quotes from David Ogilvy and it’s one that is almost a mission statement for Whitney Woods – “The pursuit of excellence is less profitable than the pursuit of bigness, but it can be more satisfying.”

 We are in a niche industry. The manufacture of pop-up and interactive products for advertising and marketing is a very limited market and each player has a different idea of what can be achieved. From our point of view, we like to get the job right. We want our customers to like us and to say nice things about us. In order to do this we like to have ultimate control over every aspect of the job from the initial quote and telephone discussion with our potential client through to packing and shipping the finished goods. That’s why we don’t use call centres. That’s why we don’t put out telesales work to 3rd party agencies and that’s why we make everything right here in Lancashire. Many of our competitors send out work to other countries to take advantage of cheap labour but that won’t do for us.

 We believe that we are on the right track and one look at our Testimonials page will confirm this belief. OK, things do go wrong from time to time but we strive never to make the same mistake twice and we learn from the experience. This also applies to product development and if we can improve on our designs then we do so. Paying attention to detail makes a big difference to a job. Even the positioning of a coin slot on a charity collection box makes a difference to its final appearance, making sure that the joins are hidden from view. The same applies to adding holes to a pop-up cube to create a pen holder and adding overlapping flaps to hide gaps. Providing a product and service that we can be proud of matters more to us than being able to add 2p to the profits by saving on quality control!