“Buy American” is a great slogan, and an important means of bringing jobs back to the USA.  But unfortunately there is lingering doubt as to whether customers are willing to pay more money for an American-made product.  The challenge is to source products that are similar in price to imported goods, because it does seem to be true that Made in the USA will influence shoppers’ choices when price is not a factor.

You may find that most of your customers don’t know which of your products are American-made, so it’s important to point this out. We have just out together an e-mail blast (using a template from Snap Retail) with a list of some of our favorite products that come from manufacturers and craftspeople in the U.S.

In putting this list together we discovered that even our sales staff didn’t know every item in the store that was American-made. We do have Made in the USA signs that we post from time to time, but we clearly need to put more effort into consistently doing this. The downside, of course, to pointing out what is American-made is that it can serve as a means of highlighting how much is not American-made. If you took all the products made in China off your shelves, how much empty space would you have?

The summer trade shows are an excellent time to try to source more American-made products.  There are also two web sites,  www.americansworking.com and www.madeinusa.org, which provide inelegant but potentially useful search engines for finding American suppliers.

We have a special interest in promoting regional merchandise, so in addition to the Made in USA signs that we keep at the ready on our store computer, we also have Made in Wisconsin and Made in the Midwest.  Those traveling abroad, or visiting our area as tourists, are especially interesting in these local products. And when it comes to a remembrance of a trip, or a special gift representing home, price is happily not usually a factor in choosing a product made in the USA.

Happy Retailing,

Carol “Orange” Schroeder