Today’s Nationwide PrimeTime experience has been all about exploring the showroom floor where hundreds of vendors have set up booths touting the latest and greatest products and services they have to offer. The vendors at PrimeTime are extremely diverse and range from well-known manufacturing giants such as Samsung, Beko and Tempur Sealy to the cybersecurity firm TBI.
Nationwide is adamant that each vendor brings a unique product, service, or skill to the table that helps its independent retailers better tackle industry challenges. Since the CE retail market is constantly changing and evolving so too is Nationwide’s family of vendor partners. For this particular PrimeTime event, Nationwide added 29 new vendors including the luxury appliance manufacturer Signature Kitchen Suites (SKS) and the Powerhouse Alliance distribution network.
In regards to the new additions, Lee MacDonald, VP of consumer electronics, told us: “We don’t onboard vendors just to onboard vendors. We’ve already got a lot of vendors and a lot of people who do business with us.” He went on to say, “We onboard vendors to solve retail solutions for our members. Every vendor here is best in class and solves a need or a challenge that our independent retailers face.”
To get a sense of what attending Nationwide PrimeTime is like from the perspective of a newly added vendor, we sat down with Pete Hollenhorst, the West Coast Regional Manager for eero. On the topic of PrimeTime, Hollenhorst said in an interview with Dealerscope: “This is single-handedly the biggest show that we have been looking forward to all year. Everybody that’s coming through the booth is happy to be here… There’s a lot of optimism about what’s going on and there are lots of different ideas coming through.”
Eero, which is owned by Amazon, is a mesh home wi-fi system that connects with your already existing internet service provider to deliver fast and secure internet with speeds up to 2.3 Gbps. According to Hollenhorst, eero is the only vendor on the floor offering mesh Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E.
Hollenhorst went on to say, “The big thing for us is just the accountability on following up and making sure to develop those relationships and connections. It’s the biggest reason why we’re here. We’re not selling to businesses. We sell to people. We are selling our strength as partners.”
