PromZ Vak 4 · 2026 · English edition

Inventory is killing. Unless you know what to do with it

quotations without showroom visits and tenders. At the same time, the first selection concepts emerged, initially featuring twelve or twenty-four items.

Feyenpak was an early adopter and won major contracts. Perhaps a little too successfully. The combination of small regional customers and large, labour-intensive tenders began to cause friction. During a busy season, virtually all attention went to the large orders. “We fell flat on our faces. By the end of that year, we had almost no regional customers left.”

It was a painful but decisive lesson. Serving only large end customers made the company vulnerable. But continuing to receive smaller regional customers ourselves, purchasing for them, and packing was unsustainable just as much. The solution was found in resale.

Extension of the reseller

By now, an estimated 60 to 65 percent of BIGsmilegroep's revenue has a resale component. Whereas resellers used to keep the origin of their Christmas packages a secret, they now collaborate much more openly with suppliers. Sometimes a reseller simply calls to say that a customer needs, for example, a Christmas hamper, a birthday concept, flowers from the company, or a loyalty program. Or asks if BIGsmilegroep is willing to take over the conversation and arrange it on their behalf.

According to Feyen, this is not a threat, but rather a strengthening. The reseller focuses on the relationship and their core business. BIGsmilegroep handles the back end of all those additional concepts: assortment, webshop, customer service, shipping, and potentially the integration with a purchasing system.

“We do not want to sit in the promotional reseller's chair. Those are our customers. We do not compete with them; we broaden their offerings.”

Branded items can be included in a customer shop, for example for onboarding or company pride, but only upon request and from the reseller's stock. BIGsmilegroep facilitates; the reseller remains the owner of the customer.

Creative poverty

The current ownership structure arose after the merger with Jongens XMAS, in which Cor Jongens acquired a 40 percent stake. The collaboration with Michel Stavenuiter began earlier, around 2016. The trigger was a discussion on LinkedIn about gift cards. Feyen called them “the creative poverty of our industry.” Stavenuiter read it, picked up the phone, and was sitting at a table in Coevorden the very next day.

This was followed by evenings during which the two endlessly searched online for products. They started purchasing and importing jointly. For Feyen, this opened up a whole new world. A fleece blanket for which he paid €8.50 at a middleman turned out to be available directly for about 4 dollars.

It underscored something that remains central today: among thousands of items, there must always be ten or fifteen products that people immediately think: I want that. Not the gift card, but that specific product.

Assortment as a counterattack

The rise of gift cards instantly gave choice concepts thousands of possibilities. Feyen, however, saw a decline in variety. Not only because margins are limited, but also because gifts are becoming increasingly abstract.

His response was radical: to build a much broader physical assortment himself. This started with a few hundred items, grew to a thousand, and later to two thousand. Currently, there are over 5,000 items in stock. Within a year and a half to two years, that number should reach approximately 7,000.

The philosophy is simple: the broader the assortment, the fewer units you need to stock per item. If something is sold out, it temporarily disappears from the shop. This way, even "Aunt Truus" can find her purple socks with pink dots, without needing hundreds of copies of every item.

The range extends from small gifts costing a few euros to selectively included products costing several hundred euros. In addition, there are physical gifts, gift cards, surprise packages, and dozens of complete Christmas hampers. Everything in one place.

Inventory as the strongest asset

“Inventory is killing,” goes a well-known entrepreneurial adage. Feyen turns it on its head. According to him, it is precisely the company's own inventory that is BIGsmilegroep's strongest asset.

When the company still shipped the choice concepts itself, the operation was labour-intensive, seasonal, and depen-