Online Shop For Painting Supplies - 600 To 800 Parcels Are Sent Daily

Online shopping is common in the private sector. Tobias van Ledden also wants to extend these habits to the craft. That is why he founded an online shop for painting supplies four years ago. We were there .

Author | Photos: Andreas Ehrfeld

The online shop for painting supplies, malerversand.de, developed from the long-established company "Schmidt Gipser & Malerbedarf" in Teningen. This company still exists today - separately from the painters' dispatch as a pick-up market for everything related to painting and plastering.

Legally organized as two companies, the physical proximity is nevertheless given: the mail order warehouse is only a few meters away. Which brings us to the first peculiarity: “We rely on warehousing in a very old fashioned way. For me that is the reason for the existence of a wholesale trade. The customer must also be able to pick up his pallet here,”explains van Ledden.

Tobias Schmidt founded the online trade, van Ledden joined the company in March 2014. "At that time I applied orally to the Schmidt GmbH without bureaucratic and was taken as a career changer." That was in 2014. Van Ledden has been taking care of the strategic development of the mail order business for three years. It was a matter of clearing some of the stones out of the way, as he likes to admit: “First of all, handicrafts are generally a rather conservative branch. Many painters are critical of the shipping of paints.”This is not entirely unfounded, after all, broken containers sometimes reach the customer. However, van Ledden has found a way to minimize container breakage.

Online shop for painting supplies: packaging developed in-house

For this purpose, own packaging material was developed in Teningen, for example a foam that stabilizes the buckets in the box. Sent by pallet, the buckets are stretched in foil. This foam is harmless, does not have to be treated as special waste, but can be disposed of in normal household waste, according to the strategist behind the painter's dispatch.

If material arrives damaged, that is no problem for the customer. "Broken goods will of course be replaced by us." Nothing is dubious here, nothing runs in dark back rooms, laughs the online expert.

In the meantime, the mail order business has established itself; between 600 and 800 parcels leave the 800 square meter warehouse in Teningen in Baden every day.

Know-how in-house

The know-how in terms of programming and SEO optimization has so far come from external service providers, but the goal is to bring this knowledge directly into the house. "I want to be able to give the mail order business a face." Additional features on the website are also being considered: "We want to be an online shop that not only sells, but also provides information."

For example, an advisory blog is to be integrated on the website, and a separate YouTube channel has already been implemented, on which it has so far been shown how the goods are packaged in a break-proof manner. In the future, however, some instruction videos will also be available.

“Digitization is not something that should scare us, it has advantages: things are simplified and more efficient. The stationary trade does not die out. The young generation, which is slowly taking over the businesses, is optimizing the processes and is also very price-conscious. By the way, the painter dispatch also accommodates the latter property through its own brand Pictolor. Everything that the painter's heart desires is available under this in-house label, from color to adhesive tape to plaster.

Further information:

www.malerversand.de

Tobias van Ledden

Many painters are critical of the dispatch of colors