The Framers Forum

Has anyone measured a 10 foot length of Simons moulding?

I see the criticism is getting more constructive by the minute.

I gave up trying to decipher the Simon's price list about 1987. Good job the Germans didn't have it during the war. If they had used it as the key to an encryption system Station X would never have cracked it. All the decoding machines would have gone bandy and the modern-day compooter would never been invented.

Excluding the Emafil mouldings the Simons 2013 catalog has 1980 mouldings in the cataloue and I worked this out by counting the number of rows and columns in the index at the front of the catalogue. Yes, there is an index at the front of the catalogue.

So, how long would it take to photograph all of those mouldings and edit / prepare all those images ready to upload to the website? It's a huge undertaking! Allowing 5 minutes each image for 1980 images, you end up with an enormous commitment in time and resources and that's only a relatively small part of creating the website. Complex websites are very expensive to create and someone has to pay for all that.

Guess who would be paying for that really stunning £250,000 website and cost of employing dedicated full time staff keeping it up to date all year round? It's you and me when we buy their mouldings!

That is probably how Simons are looking at it, but who is going to have to pay as Simons loose more and more of their market share?

producing the images is more like 1 min an image not 5, its less than a weeks work for a pro

thats based on all the samples being prepped and cut correctly etc

I would be very surprised if any supplier in our business spends 250K on a website

i would suggest some of the best sites in our industry cost less than half that if you take out producing the images

as for simons, well thats how they do business, ring and talk to someone about orders etc. yes it has the potential to go pear shaped from things getting lost in translation and costs more but thats how they choose to do business

True words. I set up a website in 2005 and it's still only got one page.

and your complaining about theirs!!!

stcstc wrote: as for simons, well thats how they do business, ring and talk to someone about orders etc. yes it has the potential to go pear shaped from things getting lost in translation and costs more but thats how they choose to do business

That may be true but it is obvious from this thread that that is not how we the customer (the one that pays them) wants to do business.

Yea but I would say we are in the minority, I mean I bet just forum members is such a small percentage of framers in the uk for starters

I would imagine the majority of images required already exist and it would just be a matter of getting the images from the original manufacturer and uploading to the Simons website.

Here is an example from an italian manufacturer's website:

http://www.abitarecornici.it/abitare/fi ... n-5-36.htm

Click on the small image of the moulding and up pops a larger one!

I guess with some suppliers you just know you won't be able to do business with them a certain way. With Simons their website is not even worth talking about, but at least you can email them. Rose and Hollis don't even have an email address. But it doesn't stop people ordering from them.

True. Go back 20 years and no supplier had a website. We had reps.