I have not kept up with SMS over the past years from when they "got discovered by many customers", but their "buying the competition" (of which they seemed to have little competition from other fabric producers) might have resulted from opportunities which presented themselves.
Such opportunities result when a company's owners/operators have been in the industry for decades, earning a good reputation with their customers, but like everybody else, reach a time in their lives where it is time to "do something else". So their operations are sold "to others in the industry" as a result. No hostile takeovers, just normal business taking place. AND we have observed this in many other areas, too, including rural real estate and the seat belt/air bag industries.
I've noticed customer dissatisfaction with SMS' long response times increasing over the past 20 years or so. They were not extremely responsive to start with. Then factor in the increased interest and expansion of their product lines (to include repro door panels (and all that might include!), I suspect the SMS organization was a bit under-staffed as it was, which only got worse with their increased level of people desiring to do business with them.
Then figure in our increase in technology as to communications and we have customers which expect "timely" communications and receive none, too. If WE can make an "instant communication with a company", we also expect the company to have at least the same level of communication capabilities, scaled-up of course.
It would be very easy for SMS or any other company to "scale up" their production and customer service operations. That does take money, which funds new production machinery for product output and more people to run the communications operations. THIS can be scary for many CEOs, as they don't desire the quality of their products to decrease OR have to outsource to other countries' employees. Many valid concerns, if thought about, BUT many which end up with $$$$ for funding basic operations plus related expansions of such.
I'm getting the impression that SMS could operate 28hrs/day for several years and just start to get caught up with their orders and such. From reading this and other forums over the past few years. If their business is that great, some investments might be in order, it seems. Although their quality might suffer in the process, it can be feared. There might be many forum posts about "how long it takes", but those might be better than forum posts of "I got my stuff from SMS and it was not up to par"? I suspect that most would desire the "time issue"!
Just some thoughts and observations,
CBODY67
