Building relationships in business is a key to success. Sound relationships are formed on trust and honesty. In order for any relationship to succeed, there must be trust. This is true of choosing your vendors as well. Many digitizing companies are popping up around the globe offering rock bottom pricing and quick turn around. It’s difficult to tell over the internet how honest a company is. Many assumptions will be made because little information about who the company truly is will be available from our side of the ocean. Whether they are using legitimate digitizing systems, employing children, providing a decent wage to their employees or honestly presenting their capabilities are answers you may never learn the truth to. Case in point The following Case in point is not sour grapes. In fact in a way it’s a compliment to SSC. I am using the following finding as an example of the deceit and dishonesty that can exist when conducting business with companies you may know little about. In some cases we do not have a means to determine who they truly are and what they stand for. Visit our website and scroll down to where you see the image of our award winning Stacks design which won first place jacket back in the 2003 EMB Honors. Now click over to this company located in China who boasts their experience and design skills. Scroll down through their samples. Do you see a familiar design? Not only is it the same design, the image is obviously the same. Stealing an image from a web site is a easy as right-clicking on the image and selecting Save Picture As from the pop-up menu. This is much easier than actually deveoping the skills to create such a design. Why would a company display samples that have been professionally cropped with a white background and some are simple scans with the fabric swatch still visible? My guess is the professionally cropped designs are ones they snatched off other web sites. If they had the capability to crop images, they would have done so on all their samples, not just a few of them. Challenge Do you know who your vendor really is? Are you willing to do business with a company who is not honest? Do you want to contribute to the success of crooks? What principles does your business stand for? Comments Posted by Kathy Buckman :: 11/26/07 I went to their website and saw the Stacks design. Look at the top of their website. They have "top quanlity". Gee! Posted by Susan Berry :: 1/14/08 Thisis so true. I was offered copies of cracked software for 90-120 dollars and can buy software openly on the web for $800.00. I am purchasing the same software from you for 5000. less trade in value from my other legal software. This is really upsetting to me but I really think I need to do my work honestly. Cracked software is a temptation but it is illegal. I know this will put me back a great deal as I don't really get to sell my designs but I want to learn to digitize honestly and maybe one day StitchBerrys (I did not rip off the name)will grow. Right now I will be using my software to teach high school students and honesty is really important. I just wish it were not so expensive. I do expect to enjoy the training but wonder if you can turn a teacher into a digitizer? Submit a comment of your own: Please include your name: Comments: