Trade Catalogue Update • May 2023

Trade Catalogue Update • May 2023

As you will all be aware, for several years we have seen unprecedented and almost constant price increases imposed by the manufacturers of the majority of the goods we supply. We have always done everything we can to minimise any price increases wherever possible, and are fully committed to doing this to ensure we can offer the best value possible to all our customers. However, despite our very best efforts it has become almost impossible to produce our regular annual trade product catalogue with meaningful pricing information that remains valid for the duration of the catalogue's lifespan. 

In 2022 we introduced 'range pricing' in our catalogue to try to give the best indication of expected prices throughout the year ahead. While this was certainly an improvement over the previous couple of years, the prices listed were only ever predictions and in some cases manufacturer price increases did unfortunately exceed even our worst-case scenarios when putting together the catalogue last May.

Because we have yet to see any significant return to the 'normal' pricing patterns of previous years, we have made the incredibly difficult decision to not produce an updated copy of our trade catalogue for 2023. Our annual catalogue has been a constant and overwhelmingly popular release ever since our company's inception over 15 years ago and we have not taken this decision lightly, however we find ourselves in a position this year where we believe there are other projects we can undertake which will further improve the service and value we offer to our customers. Because of this, we are investing all our efforts in to an upcoming, exciting new project (you may have heard, something BIG is coming) which we hope to be able to share much more information about over the summer. We're hugely excited about this project and we hope you will be too, if you'd like to be added to the mailing list for when new information is available, please contact [email protected]

Regarding our trade catalogue, we are currently working on a lightly refreshed version of last year's catalogue which will be available online shortly. This web-only version will include any new products we've started supplying since the last catalogue was printed, with any discontinued products removed. It will also be updated with more current product pricing to give a better indication of prices than last year's printed version.

We know most of our customers use our catalogues primarily as a product guide so please do keep hold of any copies you currently have as the product range hasn't changed dramatically and it will still be a great tool for product identification, please do ignore any pricing contained within any older catalogues though as the majority of pricing will likely now be out of date.

We appreciate and completely understand this decision may come as a disappointment to some of our customers, however we are 100% committed to redirecting our resources in to the new, exciting project coming later this year to ensure it benefits all our customers as much as possible. Again if you'd like to learn more about this project or if you have any feedback about any aspect of our service please do not hesitate to contact [email protected]

Many thanks as always for all your support, Team HWOS.