A lot of people only shop by price, and if you spend enough time, and call enough stores, you will eventually find the lowest price in the land on a given item. But is that all there is to it? It pays to do research on not only the dealer you are buying from, but also the maker of the piece. How customer oriented are they? Will your purchase go smoothly or will it be an exercise in frustration?

Here's a scenario that played out in my store this morning:

A customer from California ordered (2) Hancock and Moore sofas and (1) Hancock and Moore sectional in different leathers last week. She sent me an email inquiry to ask about time frame for delivery and I called to H&M to find out how long before she would have delivery.

The leather for her two sofas was in-stock (09/16/09), but the hides for the sectional were out of stock until November 20th. That meant her sectional would be two months behind her sofas and she would not get it until late January. I knew she was not anticipating that long a delay so before I replied back to her I wanted to see what could be done to close that gap. I called my best contact at H&M and explained the situation to her and asked her if she could 'chase' this hide, which is Garfield Fawn. She then put the time in to go track down the leather buyer at H&M and asked him to call the tannery and request an expeditied ship on the leather. The tannery was sold out, but re-distributed enough hides that were destined for another company over to H&M as a favor and they will be at the factory next week. We then agreed to hand-write and 'force' the production tickets on her order to bypass the computer-generated production schedule and then the frames will get started tomorrow. End result? She should have everything by Thanksgiving in her home in California if our plan comes together.

Its the willingness of the people at H&M to work with dealers such as me that make things come together when we see an issue develop. Its easy to run an order in a on fax machine and let the computers handle it all - anyone can do that - and most companies do. It takes time and effort to actually care about your customer orders and put yourself in your customer's place - then get cooperation to tweak the system to make things happen. I have great respect for the Customer Service staff at H&M and we have a fantastic working relationship - its what can make things happen when need be. Together we spent over an hour and a half on the phone going back and forth to pull this altogether. It would have been so much easier to simply reply back to my customer back and say " Sorry, it wont' be there until end of January 2010" but I knew she would not like that answer when ordering in September so I tried to change the scenario and in this case we were successful.

I'm not saying that every order that has a glitch in it can be fixed like this one was, but I will say that good dealers - and good companies - always try to make things happen for the customer when they can. It's why H&M, or any of the Hancock and Moore companies (Jessica Charles, Councill, Taylor King), are my favorites. They WORK at making things happen for the customers, unlike so many others. Jack Glasheen and Jimmy Moore would have it no other way. And neither would I.