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Flags for business

Selling flags with no stock: the guide for the small shop

A sailor walks into your chandlery on a Friday afternoon. He needs a flag for his boat before the club regatta at the end of the month, and you do not have it. He thanks you, walks out, and buys it somewhere else.

Italiana Bandiere · 23 October 2026 · 5 min read

You can sell that flag without ever keeping it on a shelf. As one of our resellers you order only what your customer has already bought, you see the delivery date before paying, and you promise that date to your customer. This guide shows how it works for a small shop, what a reseller earns in our order history, and how to apply.

The sale you lose every week

Chandleries, hardware stores, stationers, sports shops, tourist shops: people ask all of them for flags. A club flag, a country flag for the garden pole, hand flags for a school party, the flag of a region for a tourist.

Nobody can stock all of them. So the shop says «I can order it, it takes about a week», and the customer hears «maybe». The ones in a hurry leave. The ones who wait call you twice to ask where it is.

No stock, no unsold flags

Here you start with nothing to risk. No stock, no upfront purchase, no machines to buy and nothing new to learn. You order when your customer orders, and we ship to you.

That changes the maths of a small shop. Every flag you order is a flag already sold. Nothing fades in the stockroom, nothing ties up your cash, and the shelf space stays for what turns over.

A date you can promise

What loses a reseller his customers is not the price. It is the phone call where he has to say «it has not arrived yet».

On our site the delivery day is on every product, before you pay. If we get it wrong, we refund it. So you stop answering with an estimate. You look at the date, you add your own day to hand it over, and you tell your customer the day the flag will be in the shop.

The sailor on Friday gets a day he can plan his regatta around. That is the difference between a lost sale and an order.

What a reseller earns in our order history

We do not publish plan conditions. The Resellers page explains why: if we did, your customer would know what you pay. What we can show you is what resellers do with us, from our own order history:

  • A reseller who buys from us places on average 8 to 9 orders. It is not a one-off: an active reseller comes back several times a year, and reprints return season after season.
  • 66% of what resellers buy is catalogue and structures. Country flags, poles, bases: products you can sell again next season to the next customer, without a new design.
  • Resellers have been 23% of all our revenue. Shops like yours are not a side channel for us. They are almost a quarter of the business.

Behind those numbers there is a simple fact about flags. A flag lives outdoors: the sun fades it, the wind wears it out, and sooner or later it is replaced. The customer who bought one from you this spring comes back for the next one. Our article on what a faded flag costs shows the signs.

Your margin grows with you

What you earn depends on what you sell. There are several levels, and more volume means more margin. A shop that sells a few flags a month starts at one level. A shop that turns flags into a steady line moves up.

The exact conditions come in a phone call, once we know who you are and what you sell. Applying costs nothing and commits you to nothing: no fee and no obligation to buy, before or after approval.

Five shops, five customers

Every shop on the list has its own flag customer already walking in:

  • The chandlery: club burgees, regatta flags, the flags a crew needs for its boat.
  • The hardware store: the flag for the garden pole, together with the pole and the bracket.
  • The stationer: hand flags for the school party, the class trip, the town festival.
  • The sports shop: the club flag before the derby, the national flag before the big match.
  • The tourist shop: the flag of the region and of the town, for visitors who want to take it home.

For the dates that drive each of them through the year, see our flag calendar for 2027.

The moment: before your season opens

For tourist shops and chandleries the season starts at Easter. In 2027, Easter Sunday falls on 28 March, with Good Friday on 26 March and Easter Monday on 29 March.

The first customer who asks for a flag you do not stock arrives that week. Apply in the winter, have your call, and from your first day of season you answer with a date instead of «maybe». We look at one application at a time and take on few new resellers at once; if your market is already covered, we say so straight away.

How you get in

Three steps, all from the Resellers page:

  • Register on the site with an ordinary account, the one you would use to buy.
  • Send your application with your company, your VAT number, what you sell and to whom.
  • We talk on the phone. A real conversation, one applicant at a time. Then we open your plan.

When your shop grows into volume, read what the higher plan is built for. For today, one page is enough: apply on the Resellers page.

Your customer's moment does not wait. Your delivery doesn't either.

Sources: Italiana Bandiere, Resellers page, read in October 2026; Italiana Bandiere order history (shipped orders 2014–2026); GOV.UK, UK bank holidays (Good Friday 26 March and Easter Monday 29 March 2027).

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