Carte Blanche holds talks with Wishing Well agents
Carte Blanche CEO, Roger Murphy, has met individually with all Wishing Well agents to set out plans for the business over the next few months.
Agents had previously contacted GT expressing concern over future changes to their contracts.
But the meetings held in Bromsgrove, which also featured CBG's sales director, Alister Marchant, were arranged to explain CBG's decision to buy the business and outline the opportunities for Wishing Well's agents going forward.
"We told them that we are incredibly excited about the Wishing Well brand and had no intention of doing anything to jeopardise sales - for us at this time it's very much business as usual," Roger Murphy told GT.
"CBG already works with agents in other territories so we know how it works and are comfortable working in that way. If we wished to make fundamental changes to an agents contract we understand there is a cost implication.
"The big message from us to them was go out there and make it impossible for us to need to change anything. The opportunity out there is to push it [Wishing Well]. Hopefully they came out of the meeting thinking: 'I need to go out there and sell' rather than worrying about losing their agency."
However, Murphy pointed out that nothing was set in stone forever and that certain existing territorial issues within Wishing Well's sales operation might have to be addressed further along the line. He also confirmed that CBG reps did not have the capacity to book Wishing Well product and vice versa but that if there were obvious gaps in areas then they would need to sit down to understand why and work something out with the agents.
Murphy has also moved to allay retailers' fears that their terms and conditions with Wishing Well would be brought in line with CBG's.
"Again, it's not our focus to change anything at this time," he told GT. "The time it would take to pull everything together isn't frankly worth the hassle when the way to make this work for everyone is to sell more great Wishing Well product.
"For us the real immediate opportunity is in extending distribution of both Wishing well and CBG brands where appropriate because the overlap is not that huge. So the key message for everyone really is maxxing the sales potential and not in getting sidetracked in the fine detail at the moment."
Murphy also reiterated CBG's intention to keep Wishing Well's creative 'heart' in Wigan.
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