Specialty retail and trade brands
Trade and specialist brand of the year
The PLUS X AWARD, the world’s largest innovation prize for technology, sport & lifestyle, also awards special awards at regular intervals in addition to its seven established seals of approval for innovation, high quality, design, ease of use, functionality, ergonomics and ecology in order to draw attention to special achievements by brands and companies.
With its special award, the PLUS X AWARD honours brands that have made a special contribution to the trade and craft sector – brands that work in partnership with the trade and craft sector; brands that support the trade and craft sector with special promotions and training programmes, and some that develop their own sales channels and product lines for them.
The awards for specialist trade brand and specialist trade brand of the year are not based, as is usually the case, on the judgement of our expert jury, but on a Germany-wide survey for which the PLUS X AWARD, together with its partner media, calls on the specialist trade and the specialist trade to vote for their favourite brands. The importance of the specialist trade and the trade is greater today than ever before.
“It is important that the industry understands how to protect and support precisely these sales channels, if only for their own sake,” says PLUS X AWARD President Donat Brandt. He justifies this importance by means of a vivid example: “In times of increasingly strong distance selling, many end consumers make bad purchases out of ignorance. One of the reasons for this is the frequent lack of advisory competence. If a customer makes a purchase without orientation and later discovers that the product does not at all meet his expectations or the area of application, he needs help from the specialist trade or from the specialist craft.”
The partnership-based cooperation between manufacturers and the trade or craft is becoming increasingly important – also in order to be able to satisfy customers. “The awards for the best specialist trade brand and the best specialist trade brand in particular show that the company management of the award-winning brands have understood this value and that their sales management also works very responsibly and in partnership with the trade and the craftsmen,” emphasises Donat Brandt.
