Article Excerpt:
TWST: What is Liquidation World?Mr. Searby: Liquidation World is a liquidator. We have over 100 outlets, in Canada primarily, but also 16 in the US Pacific Northwest. We sell goods that we find from a variety of different situations to the public at prices 30% to 70% below what they would expect to pay elsewhere. The company was started in 1986 by a gentleman named Dale Gillespie, who thought that there was a need in the market to be able to provide a more professional solution for people with unwanted inventory. Further, there was an opportunity to take that inventory directly to the market, thereby maximizing the return for the person who needed to convert the inventory into cash. We started small and have grown organically since then to the point that we have over 100 outlets and a strong sourcing group that shops the world to find the deals.
TWST: Give us an idea of what the competitive part of the sourcing is
today. Is it a seller's market at the liquidation stage, with a lot of
companies and auction services?
Mr. Searby: There is never a shortage of competition in anything, but
certainly we have a buying network that is large, and we are continually
looking to improve that. We offer advantages in that we do not advertise
brand names or wholesale inventory, so a seller of excess inventory can
be confident that their brand will not suffer. Our customers can see the
brands on our shelves but it will not show up in a flier, disrupt the
normal distribution channels or have any negative impact on the goodwill
of the brand. In a sense, it is a form of market segmentation in that
people who are buying the brand name products in our outlets are
probably buying the no-name brands in the mainstream retail.
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