The complexity of importing activities as a Finnish company with a supplier from Mexico

By Carlos Gomez

Introduction

Within the last month, a group of motivated individuals got onboard an international business sale, which involved the product development with an overseas supplier as a direct demand for the Finnish market, importing it from Mexico to Finland because of the good previous business relationship and due to the imminent Sars-Covid19 situation.Once the import had taken place the goods sale took place to the already prospected client. The product –textile face-masks. Little did the team know what was ahead of them, a great set of challenges, uncertainty and learnings, a lot of learnings. Explaining the basics of import and export will not be included since the main target of this essay are people already familiarised with previous basic knowledge.Learning the market needs during crisis. The tendency of human health security, the large need of protecting against the novel virus and the misinformation towards the measures to follow a good eradication of such create a misconception on what to prioritise in terms of spending monetary resources; which conducts to odd shopping behaviour from clients. The toilet paper madness as one example of such conducts. The team concluded the best approach to follow was the benchmarking of such worldwide tendency and the main recommendations from WHO, giving mention also to the viral visual examples following a logic and obvious path.Product development acting as a Finnish textile importer. Textile face masks. Due to the scarcity of surgical and N95 type of masks and the required standards of such, the international market took advantage to promote alternatives, targeting the recommendations from Healthcare organisations from certain countries. It is important to mention that such “professional masks” (surgical and N95) are meant (recommended) for the medical personnel or generally most exposed population. Such as nurses, doctors, cleaners, people taking care of patients or potential infected people, between others. (World Health Organisation (WHO) , 2020)

In such need of an affordable yet working product, Expresion Texil’s idea of switching the production from kitchen textiles to textile face masks was a path to be taken in order to: fulfil market needs, stay in business and empower the economy. Such textile face mask consisting a double layer, one hundred percent cotton material with elastic rubber bands that makes a good fit to the customers face with a minimum gap of error. The set of colours were decided to be sober, following the tendency of the Finnish design. These being light grey and black. Within the individual packages a little piece of cardboard was included so the name of the client’s brand could be seen and promoted. Kideapp had an important role in the development of such insert and package design proposals. Individual packaging was targeted since the direct competitors expose their product in a similar package and it is known that the product will be sold to individuals, not to groups of people in general. As far as this date. The creation of the product took around 2 to 3 weeks since the very first pitch. The reason simply being the fast benchmarking and the previous experience from our supplier better known as Expresion Textil Hogar located in Puebla Mexico.

Learning by doing with a professional attitude.

The journey. Calls, emails, research and a lot of critical thinking while maintaining a business profile. This is what Proakatemia has taught in this period of time. The steps taken to complete an export from bottom to top in this project can be visualised as messy and disorganised due to the fact that the time framework was short and some tasks were overlapping other tasks at the same time, and there was no other obvious way to achieve a successful import in which the group could have met a more efficient step by step guideline that the team knew beforehand, with the sought outcomes and desires. New territories demand sometimes to take out a machete and cut the jungle leaves as we advance towards unknown lands. There might be other ways; true, but nothing more exciting than the adrenaline provoked by the uncertainty. The NumbersFlipping products meaning to buy cheap and sell expensive is a common yet effective way to do business. Due to private concerns no real numbers will be exposed in this writing. Thinking of the final customer always while making the calculations of the teams profit, the market price and the percentage the retailer might increase in order to have profit, the team can conclude that deciding on the price to sell is always trickier than it seems, even with all the research done companies on the last step of the chain might increase the price to reach certain credibility for a market. In this specific case triggering a 500% profit.

Finnish company meets Mexican supplier.

It’s a match.Why Mexico and not any other country? Simple; previous experiences, reliability and direct contact took a big role in taking part in doing business with Expresion Textil. Cost efficient, achieved product value and the most important, a viable communication path between both parties were also details the team took into account before diving further. Difficulties such as time zones, manners targeting formalities, language and overall personal relationships came to play. (Kras, 1990)If or when deciding on taking part on further projects together, the same problematics will be encountered but with a better and faster solving problem scheme. Better communications between parties and schedule planning will be enforced in a more ordain manner. ConclusionLuckily the team’s attitude was always to look forward the bigger picture and chasing always the best possible outcome. Meeting Avanteam’s trajectory.International business will always take time no matter the product. The time zones affect directly to the schedule of working hours and participants will have to sacrifice hours of sleep in order to make the business happen.

Bibliography

Kras, E. S. (1990). Cultura gerencial: México-Estados Unidos,.

World Health Organization (WHO) . (2020, March 9). Youtube fi . Retrieved from Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=71&v=M4olt47pr_o&feature=emb_logo