A Rant About Gibbons Products

I have used Stanley Gibbons products for many years. I have a set of the Windsor pages for GB in eight binders, also some of their single country albums and a George VI set of albums. I am growing very frustrated with how limited their product line is in some areas.

Most every other publisher I know of offers some sort of stock pages to compliment their albums, to use for covers or duplicates. Gibbons does not. Nor do they offer any protective covers for their pages. They must have a dozen different printed albums; none of them are interchangeable for pages, etc. I like the presentation of the Windsor albums but am on the verge of switching to some CD download pages I have. I can print those on standard paper and use standard stock pages and protectors. I can print my own specialty pages on my computer and not have to take the odd size blank pages for this album to a copy shop and pay $20 for a few pages to be copied onto larger paper.

SG has been doing things their own way for decades and this won't change. Sad because I think their product line could be so much better but I guess they don't see it that way.

I suspect SG does not have an active stamp collecting R&D program, thus does not have an actual appreciation of how their products are used, who uses their products or how to improve customer satisfaction to increase sales. Customer suggestions are typically viewed as complaints .... not opportunities to expand sales. "we never offered stock pages before; why start now" business theology.

You hit the nail on the head. A disconnect at most levels. I seriously question if most of their philatelic staff knows much at all about stamp collecting. That has been evident from some of my past interactions. I have made suggestions to them and gotten the polite brush off.

I could go on at length about SG but suffice to say they have totally lost the focus on stamps and regular collectors. There are a few people there who still collect and appreciate stamps but their numbers are diminishing. They have had appalling financial problems in the last couple of years and I'm surprised their products division is still in business. Their focus is now firmly on the lucrative investor and auction market.

The Machins section in the Windsor album is a God awful mess. Stamps are spread out over several sections of the album, many out of numeric order. One suggestion I made was that they separate the Machins from the rest of the issues in order to get this under control. I got a polite thank you and that is all I expected.

Please remember that even Scott (actually Amos Press or whatever they call themselves now), a U.S. company, and therefore supposedly more innovative and flexible by usual assumptions, operates in a pretty stodgy way nowadays. Maybe SG is the stodgier of the two, but it's hard to say.

Only recently, did Scott reissue some of its older country albums. They haven't changed their "International" albums in generations. Same layouts, some common stamps omitted, just higher prices for the albums. Their layout with semi-postals and air mails separate from other stamps has always baffled me. It just makes no sense.

Of the major album producers, I think the most prolific and more creative can be found in Germany -- Lighthouse, Schaubek, etc. There really are only about seven or maybe eight major stamp album publishers left. The German companies produce a complete line of albums as does Scott.

Davo in the Netherlands is also a very good producer, and I'd give them a big thumbs up for being creative and publishing a good product. They're at least as good as Scott, and I'd say better in some ways (selling individual pages in case you've damaged or lost one, for example, and offering both hingeless and non-hingeless pages for all their countries).

Back to Stanley Gibbons -- I really think they're riding on their reputation, focusing much more on big ticket auction items and stamps as "investments" than on the ordinary collector, something neither Scott nor Davo does. The German publishers' approach seems to be very consumer-oriented, too. That SG has not rationalized and coordinated their product line-up is fairly obvious, but I don't know why. I find their albums out of date and generally uninteresting. Maybe that's why they offer the Davo line of albums?