Always Feminine Care — Wholesale Supply from Spain

An empty facing is a switching event

Feminine care is bought on a calendar, not on a whim. The shopper needs it in a particular week, will not wait for the next delivery, and will buy whatever is on the shelf if her usual pack is not. That is why the retailers who list this category watch availability harder than they watch margin on it, and why the distributors who serve them well are the ones who never run a size or a count down to nothing. An assortment that is 90 per cent complete is not 90 per cent as good; it is a category that quietly hands shoppers to a competing brand and takes months to win them back.

Everything below follows from that. Iguazu Trading holds Always in Madrid as part of the baby and family care range, and the useful conversation on this line is about which packs you run and how deep you go on each, rather than about the brand, which sells itself.

The ladder, and where orders go wrong on it

The range is ordered as a small number of families rather than as a list of packs. Ultra covers the main absorbency steps, including the longer and overnight packs; Maxi carries the value end; liners and pantyliners occupy the shelf beside both. Underneath those families the packs divide again by absorbency step, by wings or no wings, and by how many units are in the bag.

The mistake is to treat those steps as interchangeable and buy the ones that were available. They are not interchangeable to the shopper, and demand across them is markedly uneven — a fixture sells a great deal more of two or three steps than of the rest, and the shape of that skew differs by market and by channel. A load built to the wrong mix looks fine on the pro-forma and sells through badly: the fast steps are gone in six weeks and the slow ones are still on the pallet at the end of the season, which means your working capital is sitting in the packs nobody asked for while the packs everybody asked for are out of stock.

So tell us what your own sell-through by step and count looks like, or if this is a new listing, tell us the channel and the market and we will work a starting split through with you. We quote against the stock genuinely available at that moment rather than against a range list, and we would rather propose a narrower assortment that sells than a complete one that does not.

Which counts each channel actually lists

• Pharmacy and parapharmacy — a short list held permanently and reordered little and often, with the specialist steps present all year.
• Supermarket groups — breadth is the point, because a gap anywhere on the ladder pushes a shopper towards a different brand.
• Cash and carry — small bags and price-marked packs, bought for onward sale to independents.
• Marketplace and discount sellers — three or four fast packs bought deep, with no interest in coverage.

The pack is the shelf

These are soft poly-wrapped packs, not rigid cartons, and the printed face is what a shopper scans for. A scuffed print face, a split seam or a pack that has been compressed out of shape is unsaleable at full price even though the product inside is perfect, and a retail buyer will reject it rather than discount it. That puts an unusual amount of weight on the build rather than on the goods.

What that means in practice: consistent tier alignment so no pack carries a point load, wrapping that holds the stack without crushing the top tier, corner protection where the build calls for it, and a stow plan that never puts a dense pallet on top of a light one. We record the build on the packing list so the receiving warehouse can check what arrived against what was loaded, which is also what makes a claim straightforward if one is ever needed.

Pads, liners and tampons are separate listings

Worth stating plainly because enquiries often blur it. Pads and liners are what this page covers. Tampons sit under a different trademark, are a different shelf position, are regulated and labelled differently in a number of markets, and rotate on their own pattern. If your fixture needs both, say so and they are handled as two lines on one offer rather than as one line with an assumption inside it.

Pack language and what a shopper recognises

Whatever a pack says, it says in the language of the market it was printed for, in that market's declaration format and to that market's conventions. European artwork therefore fits some destinations exactly and others only after work. Authorities differ on what has to appear on the outer, and individual retail customers pile their own requirements on top of that. Underneath the regulatory question sits a commercial one: this is a category bought from two metres away by recognition, so a shopper used to one design will not always accept another as the same thing, even when the product inside is identical.

Both questions belong in the first exchange, because they determine what stock we go looking for on your behalf. We confirm in writing what the available packs actually carry and what would still need arranging at your end. What we do not do is overlabel, repack or supply lookalike equivalents; where a search for wholesale sanitary protection returns unbranded and own-label manufacture, that is a different product sold to a different buyer, and if own-label production is your requirement we are not the right supplier for it.

Where European artwork rotates hardest

What follows is our enquiry book rather than research. Importers in the Gulf and the wider Middle East take European packs for modern trade and pharmacy listings. Buyers across West Africa work the value counts hard and push them through wholesale into independent retail. Supermarket listings in South-East Asia and the Caribbean lean towards the premium families. Each of those lanes implies a different split of counts, and that split is what every later decision is built on.

One freight note, since it comes up on every enquiry: this is light cargo for the space it occupies, so a container of it fills its cube with a great deal of payload unused. The nappy page works through what that means and how to plan around it in detail, and the same arithmetic applies here. Put crudely, this line is expensive to ship by itself and cheap to ship in company, which is why the strongest orders we quote on it are mixed ones.