A Time of Magic

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It used to be that watches were merely for telling the time but things have changed since those days.

Probably the best known for doing this is Swatch but there are many other brands at higher price points such as Festina watches which do much the same thing. Clearly if the watches were just for telling the time there’d be a much smaller range available but in practice you’ll find most watch brands produce a very wide range these days.

Even with the standard sports type watch you’ll find variations in the colour of the face, the strap, the material used to make the watch and that’s before you even consider those aimed at deep divers, those for shallow dives and so on.

To a large degree this change is down to changing attitudes of consumers who increasingly look for something unique thus the bog standard sports watch in stainless steel isn’t good enough and instead you get all the variations mentioned above. 

The problem with furniture is that it’s big and so the shops just can’t stock a whole lot of it.

This makes it the furniture catalog a standard accessory for any aspiring furniture sales outlet. There’s just no way that they could possibly stock the full range of possibilities for you to look at these days and besides with modern manufacturing much of the furniture is made to order with so many possible options that a whole city full of shops wouldn’t be large enough to stock all of the possibilities.

For me though the biggest plus point of the catalogue approach is that you don’t need to trudge round endless furniture shops looking for that perfect item and, of course, you don’t get the constant hassle from salespeople trying to sell you something when you really haven’t made your mind up about it.

I know I shouldn’t really, but I end up filling at least two plastic bags with various promotional items from every trade show that I go to.

They’re all useful, of course, but I’m always amazed at how few of the things which companies give out are any use in reminding those collecting them about what their company is all about. The very worst of these was one company a couple of years ago which handed out these really cute little pens which just had their company name on them. Now promotional pens are, on the whole, a “good thing” in that people keep them around for ages (if it’s a decent pen) but this company had only put on the company name (not a famous one) and no contact details at all.

Net effect? Well, people were actually going to their stand to get these pens but I’ll bet they got very little return on them: they were just that little bit too cute.