Tarifold Turnover

Stamp dealers often use a display system known as a tarifold. Typically a stand holds 30 plastic pages in which 60 sheets or pages can be displayed back to back. Currently we have 14 of these and more in reserve when we have more counter space ("Real soon now," our contractor keeps saying).

In the past number of years these have grown in a somewhat indiscriminate manner. At first we put into the tarifold oversize items and items we felt were of a lower philatelic standard than our books, then we put more and more pretty topical stamps into the tarifolds. We then expanded a little into a tarifold devoted to Canadian souvenir sheets and the like which are popular with tourists.

Stamp dealers, on the whole, are not very smart retailers. And I'm a poster boy for being a dumb retailer. The tarifolds are very popular with the public generally and even the most advanced philatelist will usually flip through a few pages. If they are one of our best selling tools, why, why, and why have we not made better use of them?

Kate has started putting together nice pages of displays of our better Commonwealth stamps; she will continue with foreign and then Canadian. These pages show off our expensive stamps as photocopies. The first tarifold is finished and it certainly sends a message that we had not been sending before as people flipped the pages. It is going to take many weeks to finish but eventually our tarifolds will have a good representation of what is found in our stock. We will still have attractive topical sets but will also have a much better representation of everything we offer.