Draminski were one of the first into the UK market, when it came to small ultrasonic and agricultural devices. As such, they enjoyed a monopoly on a number of products, particularly dog pregnancy detectors, ovulation detectors and mastitis detectors.
Their approach was simple: find partners they could trust, who had real expertise in a particular area, and work closely with them. It was an approach that worked very well.
In 2014, however, Draminski broke with tradition. They had been working on a new type of portable ultrasound scanner (the iScan), using electronic beam forming, and not the increasingly outdated mechanical sector technology that their other machines were employing. Nervous that they would not see a return on their considerable investment, they made a fatal error: they opened up the market to anyone.
Departing from their tried-and-tested model, they no longer required that their distributors have experience or knowledge, and they weren’t interested in customer service or support. They just wanted to sell units, and they wanted to sell them today. Tomorrow didn’t matter. In this way, they eroded their reputation in the industry, and their squeaky-clean image was irrevocably destroyed. No distributor would throw their weight behind the now tainted Draminski iScan, and those who had originally bought into it began to drop it like hot cakes.
Rather than learn from their previous mistake, Draminski then turned to their small devices. An area in which Draminski already enjoyed as close to a monopoly as one could get in a limited market (after all, you cannot persuade just anybody to buy a dog pregnancy detector!), the company again decided that knowledge and expertise were no longer prerequisites to selling their equipment, and began selling wholesale to dog breeders, grooming parlours, and other small businesses who had no technical or medical expertise.
Why did this happen?
Once the original founder Janusz Draminski took a backseat, the entire ethos of the company began to change. A company with a valuable history of quality and integrity effectively sold out, and a reputation 30 years in the making was near-obliterated by short-term greed. This is not a trend unique to the UK market – indeed, a similar loss of faith that has been seen in other countries and territories to a greater or lesser extent, such as Australia, South Africa, and Canada.
Where next?
From the moment Draminski decided to operate on a Chinese-style business model, they effectively removed themselves from the market. If you will sell to people who only know how to sell your product £1 cheaper than the next guy, you will always lose out to the Chinese, because in a price battle, the Chinese will win every time. Whether Draminski will reassess their approach to the UK market and go back to a focus on quality remains to be seen, but the sad fact is that, in their fight for market share from major competitor BCF Technology, many years have been lost. Indeed, an entire generation of ultrasound scanners has almost certainly been lost to history, with no motivation for the product launch that it sorely needed.
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