Arqadia

[FramingNovice]

does anyone know who arqadia buy directly from?

i know its in italy, but don't know specifically the individuals?

can anyone help? i think i'd like to move over to them from my current supplier, but want to do a bot of background checking first.

thanks

[Dermot]

I don’t think it is just one supplier, most likely a number of manufacturers from Italy, Spain, Brazil and a few other places also…

[penfold]

You want to do a background check on Arqadia? OK, but who are you using now? did you do similar research on them. It seems just a tad excessive to me when you could simply ask for opinions on here.

[robbiez]

Arqadia - By far the best for service and systems, not the cheapest on every product but no one is.
They buy from a number of sources, but you are unlikely to find out who. The reps don't even know.

[mikeysaling]

good company to deal with - everyone helpful - even when out of stock give you a pointer (i never said that!!!) YOU WILL NOT BUY CHEAPER - buy from them why not? dont understand why you want to import etc etc rod for your back - after all you make frames you dont import raw material!

[FramingNovice]

Arqadia are middle men, similar to Simons, cut out the middle man, cut down your costs.
yes there will be added issues by dealign directly, but in the long run it may well be worth it, which is what i want to investigate.

i'm surprised others haven't thought about this and am surprised people seem to wonder why i wouldn't want to do it...????

it's my business and all i want to do is investigate all channels open to me.

open your minds people, thats all i'm saying

[Comfyjumper]

I tried to bypass the suppliers of my underpinner in order to try and source some support arms direct from the manufacturer, but was politely refered back to them...and i'm still waiting

[robbiez]

But the middleman buy in hundreds of thousands of meters per order and receive massive discounts. These discounts are passed on to framer in order to make them more attractive.

We were quoted from a company in Spain for 10000meters of moulding. The price was only a few pence per meter cheaper than the Arqadia alternative. Yes if we had ordered 500,000 meters from them it would have been about 50% cheaper than Arqadia.

It should also be noted that if you went to Arqadia and told them you wanted 5000 meters of the same moulding they would probably give 30% off their prices anyway.

If you do find any direct routes to the manufacturers I would love to hear about them, as in theory you should be able to buy cheaper by cutting out the middleman.

[Gesso&Bole]

Generally a manufacturer, whether they have entered into an exclusivity deal or not with a large wholesaler like Simons or Aqadia would not be interested in compromising that relationship for the sake of selling a few thousand feet of moulding to an end user.

I think you would also find that there would be a lot of work and costs involved with importing. Obviously I don't know what sort of quantities you are looking at, but for most of us bespoke framers it makes far more sense to work with the wholesalers and concentrate on turning the sticks of moulding into frames.

[simons rep]

well said gesso...that is exactly how it works. Bulk buy in hundreds of thousands of mtrs and not a few thousand. And the manufacturer would not cut there nose off to spite there face, they are not penny wise and pound foolish!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Jonny2morsos]

i'm surprised others haven't thought about this and am surprised people seem to wonder why i wouldn't want to do it...????

We have and it ain't worth it unless you have aspirations of being the next Arqadia or Simons or Framing Novice International plc.

[Not your average framer]

If every customer always chose the same range of mouldings and you had enough customers like this, then maybe you could move enough of these mouldings to make it pay. Unfortunately real life is not like that.

Then again, what happens when the fashion for a particular moulding changes. Anyone who still has large stocks of it, has a real big struggle to sell it.

There's a lot of good reasons why most of us buy from the normal suppliers, such as:

We can usually get whatever we need the next day, if that's what we want.

Any problems and we can send it back.

It's much better for cash flow to depend on your suppliers stock.

Most suppliers have reps, who are good at keeping you informed about new products, helping you negociate volume discounts and calling in on you with sticky buns to go with the tea.

The amount you can save by bypassing the normal suppliers, is not a big deal when you compare it with the kind mark-up's that most of us are charging. Don't forget that the frame moulding is only a part of what goes into in customer's framing order.

It's a lot of extra hassle, to save only a small amount in proportion to your final price to the customer. If you added the amount you would be able to save onto the final price of each of your customers jobs, I doubt if any of your customers would notice.

Most of us are looking at the bigger picture, instead of spending large amounts of money to save peanuts. Life's to short!

P.S. I hear there's some real good deals to be had buying glass by the container load.