There is nothing worse than when you and your customers are waiting on products. Not only is it aggravating and heartburn-inducing, but it also can damage your business relationships.
Don’t put yourself through the headaches of wondering when your shipments are going to arrive. If you use vendors that are not well-connected with a network of factories, it can cause problems for keeping your customers supplied.
Everybody expects disposable gloves to be of top quality. It’s considered the baseline (even if not every vendor lives up to it).
Very few vendors that sell gloves, however, go a step further and insert an extra layer of quality control that involves 100% inspections.
Have you ever had questions about which disposable gloves match your needs? Although the topic may seem mundane, single-use gloves are a lot more nuanced than many people think.
In a business that has become largely transactional, AMMEX has systems and processes in place to make sure your questions are answered and your needs fulfilled—by actual humans.
AMMEX has been selling disposable gloves for 35 years. Questions come up daily about how we help customers find the right gloves for their jobs.
Let’s face it: Disposable gloves are out of the ordinary compared with the staples that industrial distributors carry. We know how surprisingly challenging gloves can be to sell effectively; they have specific attributes and target specific needs, and there can be a learning curve in getting all the details just right. We have many tools that answer many glove questions for you. So instead of researching product specifics, you can focus on pitching, prospecting, and closing.
AMMEX just completed its first survey of gloves with Raised Diamond Texture (RDT).
We asked dozens of users to give us their impressions of our RDT suite of single-use gloves: 8-mil orange (GWON) and green (GWGN), and 6-mil black (GWBN) and royal blue (GWRBN). This provided a useful snapshot of a much larger field of opinion.
Domestic transportation prices—another important variable in the overall cost of single-use gloves—spiked during the pandemic. They have been dropping, but are unlikely to return to pre-pandemic levels due to the cost of labor and the general impact of inflation and higher interest rates.
Most companies that need warehousing to store imported products, such as disposable gloves, have seen significant price increases over the past two to three years. Even as supply chain inflation slows, warehouse rates are high because there is a lot of inventory, which leaves less space for new product.
International shipping is another cost variable that exerts outsized influence on the price of disposable gloves.
Ocean freight rates in 2023 have been on a steady decline for shipping containers from SE Asia to U.S. West Coast ports. Experts fear transport companies will try to force up prices by making fewer voyages and leaving containers behind, delaying the delivery of goods.
The three primary variables that have an often outsized impact on the single-use glove market are production, international logistics, and U.S. market conditions. Within those variables are a number of sub-variables that can move in opposite directions and in different timelines.
Production happens primarily in Southeast Asia, where up to 80% of single-use gloves are made. The biggest glove-making countries are Malaysia and Thailand—which have dominated the glove trade for years—Vietnam, and Indonesia. China is also a growing player in the global market.
Over the past three years, three primary variables—production, transcontinental logistics, and U.S. market logistics—have combined to keep the disposable glove market dynamic and at times volatile. Their impact has been surprisingly outsized.
In 2020, the pandemic turned the market (and the world) upside down. Shortages and price increases added challenges at every level of the business. Manufacturers turned their production lines over to thin medical-grade gloves. As a result, industrial products—especially thick and heavy nitrile—became scarce and expensive.
If there’s a thread that runs throughout AMMEX’s 35-year history, it’s commitment to customers.
Ever since 24-year-old Fred Crosetto started this company in 1988—and at first sold gloves out of the trunk of his car as he built his brand—AMMEX’s focus has been on delivering what customers need, as well as helping them grow their glove sales.
