It’s perhaps something which is not really noticed by everybody who frequents the same shopping malls or complexes, but you’ll often find some stores which always appear to be empty. You find yourself questioning whether they do indeed make any profit at all, but then quickly conclude that they surely must make some profit since the store remains operational and is clearly able to afford the high rental price that comes with the location it’s based in.
If your nagging thoughts about this have you digging a little deeper, as is the case with any real entrepreneur with an eye for opportunity, looking closer may even have you puzzled a bit further since the in-house stock of whatever it is they’re selling appears to be limited.
Often this is a classic case of the physical store catering to a very specific market and all they really need to do is sell one or two units every month to cover the rent while their subsequent profits come from repeat clients, bulk clients and selling products and services further in support of the stock they’ve already pushed.
Often this rather sleepy looking store is part of a B2B type network which deals in markets as specific as servicing the environmental equipment space so while as a Saturday morning shopper you’re not likely to waltz into an environmental equipment store spontaneously, if and when you really need environmental equipment you won’t be going anywhere else but to that rather lonely-looking store.
This is when you discover that there is a whole lot more to it than what meets the eye and pretty much every physical outlet for environmental equipment is connected to the likes of the ENVIEQ store, an online supplier of environmental equipment. This is also when shopping online is about more than just convenience, albeit shopping online by extension since end-users who are paying for the solutions available at www.envieq.com are usually not even aware of it.
So when there’s a contractor working on-site something like a construction site in the neighbourhood, powered by a full team of surveyors, engineers, project managers, etc, that is when the likes of that environmental equipment store which seemingly stands devoid of customers at the mall is making its money. Of course the original supplier is in on the action too, in the form of the likes of the ENVIEQ store, but one can never really tell for sure from the Lehman’s point of view.
For example, a Multiparameter Data Sonde Hydrolab is a piece of equipment which only makes sense to a contractual planner who might be operating under strict environmental preservation laws, in which case they’d have this piece of equipment with them, deploying it along a few others, and the unsuspecting onlooker wouldn’t even know that it comes from that hardware store which looks like it could use more customers at the mall.
So much more equipment passes through these outlets and through direct channels (online), covering categories such as monitoring, water quality, and remediation in addition to sampling.