Hey, happy New Year to all of you out there.  Again I would suggest some sort of resolution to spend less time reading aimless blogs on your part, but if you have to read one, why not this one.

In part it feels like a whole new year, and in part, very much just like a continuation of a previous week.  This month we have a bunch of things going on in the shop. We run our only sale of the year in the middle of January.  With all the sales out there,  I always have trouble expressing on the one hand how little I like the whole idea behind sales and what they have become, and on the other hand what a great deal this sale is.  It seems that so many shops run un-ending sales.  I remember my days at Dayton’s Oriental rug department where we had these 30-40% off signs that never left the top of the rug piles.  It never occurred to us to sell a rug at the tagged price.  Yet strangely enough, even the people that frequented the department would, when it came time for them to buy a rug, place value in the fact that there was indeed a sale going on.  Add to that, if you are always running a sale, maybe you should consider lowering your margins and just have correctly priced goods.  But that all gets to a chicken and the egg questions.  If people always get excited to buy at sale time, then stores are going to run more and more sales, then people are always going to wait for a sale, then stores are always going to run a sale.  

Now comes the pitch.  Our sale is a really good sale.  Consider this:  if, at any other point during the year, we give a discount because of a scratch or for something that has been around a while, or whatever, the most we ever do is 20%. That 20% is a lot to us – it considerably dips into our margin.   For this sale, virtually everything is half off.  It really removes any profit for us.  Sounds like a brilliant business strategy by some guy with an art history degree with a philosophy minor, or better yet, some ex-rug merchant sales pitch “For you my friend, very special deal. . .”  Well here is where our up side comes in.  January is a slow money month, it’s also – to state the obvious – the beginning of the year.  The sale brings people in because it’s a great deal on great stuff, it clears out our inventory and creates cash flow so we can then go out and buy this winter and spring’s inventory for our showroom floor.   It also gives us an excuse to get our name out in front of our client base, which is a good thing even if they don’t come in and buy stuff.  Just reminds them that we are here.  We shall see how it goes.  If my post sale entries to the blog only seem to be using half of the letters that the words should have, well then you know things didn’t go well with the sale because we can’t afford to use all of the letters.  Of course if I am suddenly writing in big flourishing needlessly multi-syllabic words, well papa made some money and is feeling flush.

Now all that rambling is just about the sale, and if I have not gone through and edited that section down to one paragraph rather than two before I post this, I apologize.  The other big push is on the wholesale end of the business.  We have the New York show at the end of this month.  That ends up being a big logistics scramble.  The show is at the Javits Center and the piers on the mid-town west side of Manhattan.  It runs for five days and is considered more of a middle-upper end show for accessories and gifts.  All the vendors like myself ship all of our samples there, set up a booth, push the merchandise on the buyers, then pack up and ship the samples to the next show and go on our merry way home.  The challenging part (I am not using “challenging” and a euphemism for “problem” – I hate it when people do that, why be so scared of admitting that something is actually a problem?), is that I have pieces being shipped in from different countries and different parts of this country, all needing to arrive at the pier in a two day window with all the correct marking on them, it all has to fit in my booth, and it has to be the right stuff that I ordered so I am presenting myself correctly with the right merchandise to my clients.  Does it all come together? Hardly.  The good news is I don’t expect it to.  My thinking is I do all that I can to have it all come together.  After that, the things that happen to all of these shipments along the way that are out of my control are just that: out of my control.  Sound a little deceivingly laid back or borderline delusional – especially for someone who just went on a rant about people deluding themselves out of using the word “problem”?  Well yes, my friend, it is delusional.  But for the first few years of doing these shows, tilting at windmills i.e. the shipping companies, customs, freight brokers, duties, dropped balls, the  really could care less-ers, the “I would rather pick the food out of my teeth rather than help move your shipment along” people of this industry, well the delusional laid back approach is the method of choice for me.  Ultimately as long as I have some nice looking stuff in my booth arranged in a pleasing way and a piece of paper and pen to take orders with, I should be all right. With this part of the business, setting the bar as low as possible for logistics is the best choice.

The good news is we have quite a few exciting new directions this year.  Our ceramics line is back on track as far as production, and as long as I don’t overload them with too many new pieces I want made, we should move along in good fashion.  The natural wood and vine pieces I am starting to bring in are making me happy in a couple ways.  One, I like what they do environmentally.  The wood is all dead fall wood, and the vines are all a renewable resource.  They bring income to local people without inspiring them to run into the woods and start cutting trees down.  Two, and it’s a completely self serving reason, on the next trip I am going into the forests of Central Thailand with these guys and camping over night searching for some of these pieces, that should be a fantastic experience.  The line that I am hoping to start bringing in from Belgium is also all done in an environmentally correct way.  The teak they use is all plantation certified or reclaimed wood from old homes.  Not only that, but it’s a beautiful line of furniture.  The company that we are working with in Vietnam not only works in lacquer ware, but also in various forms of translucent fiberglass, galvanized metal and ceramics which created a great opportunity to created new varieties of tables and accessories that combine these mediums.  

New trip include South Africa for some more unusual tribal artifacts and new cottage industry “fair trade-ish” pieces.  These places aren’t necessarily under the umbrella of the “Fair Trade” thing, but are local organizations that help employ local communities – same idea as fair trade, just no nice sounding title. I mean that in a positive way – the Fair Trade organization is a very good thing, but it is something that many unheard of people have been doing for years, but completely unsung.  Anyway, this trip is also for a family wedding in Johannesburg, so my whole family from various parts of the globe will be showing up there (they are all ex-pats from the North of Scotland, some of whom settled in South Africa).  Only a couple days in Johannesburg (its not meant to be the safest or nicest of cities), than off to Cape Town and surrounding areas for 5 days, up to Durban and the game reserves for the last 5 days.  At some point during the year I will go back to back to India (its become a once a year trip rather than twice a year with all the other destinations that are showing up on my travel list), but with a little side trip hopefully to the un-traveled region of Gujarat as well as my regular haunts in India.  Maybe back to Nepal, and certainly back to Thailand a couple of times, hopefully on one of those trips up into the hills of Laos in addition to the sojourn in the woods of Central Thailand.  Of course the afore-mentioned New York show, once in January and once in August, and the infamous High Point show, once in March and once in October, then its November, December, back to the holidays and then suddenly back to the 2008 sample sale.  For that blog entry, I will save you quite a bit of time and just say something like “refer to last years entry” or better yet “move on to something else more interesting that the web has to offer, like a web page with a clock on it, or a web cam watching grass grow.”