Great plan. Terrible timing.

The bet.

There's a risk every brand runs with a distributor: one day that distributor becomes your competitor. I know it because we were those guys.

For 20 years we were a European master distributor. The only one of our kind in the market, with a full dealer network across the continent, including private label and brand clients. We knew exactly what European customers needed, because we were the ones serving them every day.

Then the structure started to break. Steel prices went through the roof on our cost side. Lower-priced competition hit us on the other. We were the middleman, squeezed from both directions, and the margin we'd built the business on began to vanish.

We had a choice: run aground as a distributor, or become the manufacturer ourselves. We chose to build.

The cash outlay was brutal. Engineers, moulds, tooling, and an assembly line from nothing. We took on serious debt, and at times we spent more time in India than in the UK. The loans built the factory, and our European customers were going to pay them back. We'd budgeted it tight. We needed to keep 80% of our dealers just to service the debt.

The job.

Customers panicked. The dealers we'd banked on started talking about pulling out. Overnight, the one advantage we had, being inside Europe, was gone, and the people we needed weren't sure they could buy from us anymore.

So the job was simple to say and hard to do. How do you sell into Europe when you're not in Europe? And how do you do it before a dealer network you've bet the company on walks away?

The result.

We took importation off the dealers entirely and carried it ourselves. We set up properly inside Europe, so buying from us felt no different to buying from a business down the road.

We needed 80% but kept every single one. And then it went further. Holding stock in Europe with fast, reliable delivery let us reach small dealers we'd never been able to serve from the outside, the ones whose orders were too small to bother with across a border. We became the largest spreader manufacturer in Europe, then the largest in the world.

Why Faber & Strata exists.

I've since moved on from spreaders. In the years after, I worked as a European business development manager for a number of companies, and I kept running into the same problem. The same broken distribution I'd just escaped, only worse. Distributors who owned the customers, the data, the pricing. Brands flying blind in their own market.

I could see exactly what was wrong. I just couldn't fix it, because I wasn't the operator. I was advising a structure I had no authority to change.

So I built the thing I wished had existed. Faber & Strata runs the operation that keeps you in control of Europe. Not advice from the outside. The operator on the inside. I've done it already, with everything on the line.

Not advice from the outside. The operator on the inside.

We learned it the hard way. We owned the customer but not the product. The brand we worked for owned the product but not the customer. Two halves of one business, and the split nearly killed both of us.

It's not that distributors are bad. It's that the rules have changed. Competitors are going direct, and a layer in the middle now makes life harder for everyone in the chain.

Keeping those two halves together is the whole job now.