Some cash-conscious stores turn more to wholesalers as retailers reduce their inventory

An anniversary and a rebirth put the focus on Anchor Distributors and Spring Arbor, the oldest and largest wholesalers, respectively.

Anchor's booth signage highlighted that the company founded the same year as sister-publisher Whitaker House was marking its 40th anniversary, but more attention went a few aisles away where Spring Arbor was turning over a new leaf.

The Christian market division of Ingram unveiled a new logo as it rolled out "reinvigorated" services to the Christian retail market.

The new look features a single green leaf alongside the name, replacing the former triangular tree that formed part of the initials SA.

Skip Prichard, president and CEO of Ingram Content Group (ICG), said that the revised logo "symbolizes our renewal and our recommitment to the Christian market as the relevant and reliable category leader."

Among the changes introduced to stores were an expanded inventory to include more family-friendly films, music, Bible covers and communion ware.

The initiatives have followed a broader restructuring of ICG that also aims to make Christian products more easily available to other channels, too. Prichard said that the move reflected shifts in the market in recent years and meant that product from the general market also could, where appropriate, be offered more readily to Christian retailers, to whom SA remained as committed as it had always been.

With its "re-invigoration" of its Christian channel services, SA was not following the line that the market was shrinking, he said. "When you say the market has shifted but it is still there, it allows you to bring resources to the market that otherwise might not have been warranted," he told Christian Retailing.

Though the reorganized company would look to provide Christian content to other channels that wanted it, Christian retailers remained "the primary place in the community where Christians can gather to find their content," he said.

"They are the purveyors and selectors of great content, and you are never going to have a large secular bookstore that can match their passion and expertise in Christian content, but that does not mean you should think therefore they shouldn't carry any Bibles in that store," added Prichard, who said that he shared a personal passion for the Christian products world.

"For Christian retailers, to have the ability to remain relevant is their biggest challenge, and any way we can help participate in making them more relevant, we are delighted to enter into those discussions," he said.

Anchor Vice President Bob Whitaker Jr. said that his company was "very excited" to have agreed on a distribution deal with gift supplier P. Graham Dunn, expanding its range of non-book items that also includes Messianic products and church supplies.

Whitaker said that sales had "stayed level" for the past several years in part because of the broader inventory and also as a result of stores reducing their inventory and replenishing more from distributors rather than ordering direct from suppliers. In addition, he said, the company was handling fulfillment for 40 publishers who had outsourced warehousing and shipping to cut costs.

Without a birthday to mark, STL Distribution President Glenn Bailey jokingly claimed the allegiance of host city's sporting teams—who bear the initials STL—as his company's promotion for the week.

More seriously, he observed the gradual move of stores from "the 'stack them high and let them fly' mentality" to tighter control of inventory. Retailers were realizing that they have to pay attention to cash flow, he said. In addition, "tough economic times should mean that they care more about freight and the number of orders they are placing. ... All these things work in our favor."

That trend, along with an expanded inventory made possible by STL Distribution's move last fall into a larger warehouse, meant that the company had remained "roughly flat" despite the tough economy. Growing areas of business were serving stores' online sales needs and the church bookstore market, where STL Distribution had reached nearly 1,000 accounts.

"We are the company most committed to having what Christian retailers sell," he said. Meanwhile, overseas business was up from 1% to 7%, Bailey added, in part because of the opportunity to provide services in the wake of the collapse of longtime national distributors in Canada and the U.K.

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