Cartridge franchise local to The Recycler’s Witney office discusses business, OEMs and the importance of good customer service.
Nigel Brookes, owner of the Witney branch of cartridge franchise Cartridge UK, spoke to The Recycler about his cartridge refilling business, explaining that the store opened in 2007 and has since built a small but loyal customer base.
“We average 400 retail customers per month, and I think about 90 percent of those are repeat customers. In terms of business customers, we have around 200 on our book and probably 60 of those order at least once every two months. We have some customers who have been with us since Day One and we are so good to them, I know they’ll never leave us. With all our business customers, I’ve never put the prices up, ever. So I have customers paying the same price as they were six years ago”
Brookes believes that providing excellent customer service is important in a business where competition from online companies selling cheaper products is rife. “There is no way we can compete with some of the online guys. We get people saying they can buy 10 sets of cartridges for £20 [$30.73/€23.46] – which is possible, we know the price of buying them – but that’s when you’re dealing in bulk. We could sell cartridges for £1 [$1.53/€1.17] each if we were selling 10,000 a week, but I’m not! We’ve got the overheads of a shop to run.
“There are very good compatible and remanufactured cartridges available online, but the difference in coming to a shop is that if there’s a fault with the cartridge, we can easily swap it over and the customer isn’t waiting for it to be posted back or having an argument over whether it’s faulty or not. That’s why we don’t have an online shop – we want to be local. If we get an enquiry from further afield, we usually push them on to a Cartridge World that’s nearer to where they are.”
Brookes emphasised that the aim is to “encourage people to use recycled cartridges” and that the franchise is not in competition with similar businesses like Cartridge World. “We have five stores in Oxfordshire, whereas Cartridge World only has one, in Banbury. The only place where both franchises are present is Hereford, and both are doing well.”
Commenting on the recent issues raised on BBC’s Watchdog, Brookes said that “it would’ve been great if they had compared the running costs of remanufactured or refilled cartridges with those of OEM cartridges”, explaining that an effective strategy he uses to convert customers from using OEM products to refilled is to show them a spreadsheet comparing the overall running costs of OEM versus refilled cartridges.
Brookes went on to detail his own experiences of witnessing misleading ink levels in OEM cartridges, noting that “Epson cartridges all look identical in size but range from holding 19ml to 2.5 ml”. He also expressed his disbelief at the price difference between XL and regular cartridges: “All the costs are in producing the packaging, the ink is a negligible cost. So why is an XL cartridge three times the price? The only difference is that someone in the factory presses a button saying fill it with nine millilitres rather than three. That extra six millilitres probably costs 10p!”
You can read more from Nigel Brookes in a future issue of The Recycler.