Welcome to Firsthand LOOK, a series of articles written about our business practices here in the Firsthand shop. The following is a summary of our retail goals and principles, and the expectations you can have of us as a partner in your framebuilding endeavors.
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Hey there, Chris here. For the past month or so, I’ve been busy lining up suppliers for the Firsthand retail shop. Full disclosure, I’m new to retail and e-commerce. Perhaps it's that naivety, but I’ve been surprised at some of the practices I’ve discovered while stocking our store shelves. As such, I’ve decided I should outline a set of principles as it relates to our own sales goals. If nothing else, I hope these give you some insight into our broader motivations here at Firsthand.
1. We’re invested. All in. If it's for sale, it's in stock.
You know the feeling. You purchase something from an online retailer, a few days pass, and then you get an email letting you know that the item you just bought will be in stock in 10-14 days and will ship after an additional few days of processing. Come again? Why did I buy it from you, then? And why didn’t you tell me this before I did so? It's frustrating, no?
As a rule, if you see an item listed for sale in our store, that means it’s physically sitting on our shelves, ready to be shipped. Items we typically stock but have sold out of will be marked “Out of Stock”. And items that we have no intention of re-stocking will be removed from the store. Period. End of story.
That, above, seems to me like it should be a given. Being new to this retail thing, I naively assumed that most small stores actually stock the goods they sell. As I’ve worked to set up Firsthand, though, it’s becoming clear to me that not only is that not the case, but that more often the opposite is true. That feeling described above is the rule, not the exception. In 2025, most e-commerce stores are merely online catalogs. They list products for sale that they don’t actually stock, and either backorder or drop-ship those items to “their” customers only after they’ve been purchased and paid for. In other words, they don’t look at their own inventory as an investment, they look at it as a liability. As a result, they minimize those dollars sitting on shelves, and become mere middlemen marketers. They take on no risk, and therefore aren’t directly invested in their customers’ businesses.
I don’t want Firsthand to be a pointless middleman. I want to add actual value to the framebuilding community, and that means putting our money where our mouth is and actually physically stocking the goods we sell.
In 2025, anyone can make a functional website (hey, if I can do it anyone can!) and set up suppliers. Being able to sell online means nothing. Holding inventory and having it available for immediate purchase by your customers… that’s what counts.
In short: when you buy your supplies from us, you’re recognizing that we’ve made an investment in our inventory, and therefore an investment in you and your business. I hope that means something.
2. We’re intentional. We sell brands, not SKUs.
In our shop, every single item comes from a specific, listed brand. Once again, I’ve been surprised to see how many online stores purchase generic goods in bulk, mark them up a few pennies or dollars, and re-sell them. To them, this retail business is merely a game. Modern retailers seem only interested in “gaining eyeballs” and “converting sales”. As a result, the goods they sell have passed through 2, 3, or sometimes even 4 different sets of hands (and therefore multiple rounds of markup) before being offered to you.
As such, I’ve decided that Firsthand will only ever buy direct from manufacturers. Further, we’ll always list the manufacturer of our products explicitly on our site. Most industrial goods are stocked and sold by a handful of national distributors who collect markup for merely warehousing inventory. Retailers then buy from those distributors, and become de facto marketers. Eyeball getters. Sales converters. As a result, you the customer pay double the necessary markup, at least.
Committing to buying only from manufacturers means that the pool of products we’ll have to pull from is smaller than might be ideal. As such, we won’t be offering all the little bits and bobs that some other retailers sell. There’s absolutely no reason for us to sell you cheap, generic drills, taps, screws, washers, shop roll, whatever. You can buy all that stuff from your local hardware store or McMaster-Carr, for a lot less than we could ever offer it.
Besides, working directly with manufacturers is super fun. We get to make relationships with the actual makers of the things we sell in our shop. If we have questions, we can pick up the phone and call them. When we place PO’s, we’ll be sending those orders to the same person again and again. Our entire offering is marked up only once, and that markup actually represents some amount of effort and added value to you, the customer, our primary focus.
It’s our ultimate goal to be your long-term partner for readily available, trustworthy goods from the best independent manufacturers for framebuilding supplies in the world. If that means you have to buy your 5-pack of M5 torx head screws elsewhere, so be it. Ha. I don’t want any part of that mess.
3. We’re stubbornly transparent. If you can get it elsewhere for cheaper, we’ll tell you so.
To be continued…