So day two of the buying trip will be a much shorter edition.  I had my meeting with the ceramics people that had the “employee issues,” if you remember me talking about that in the fist edition of the blog - which is what initiated this buying trip in the first place.  But that was only one of the problems that we were having with this manufacturer.  The bigger problem was simple communication.  Over the years of working with these ceramicits, I have always had problems understanding what they were putting into production for me, and why one piece that I ordered was not being made, while another was being made..  On their side, they had a hard time understanding myquestions that I would write in e-mails, and as a result would not say that they didn’t understnad, vbut instead move on to something else and let orders drop instead of asking me to be more clear inwhat I am asking. Take a combination of that, and the general week  to weeks long response time that is the standard in my business in Asian and India and my not bothering to learn the language of the people I am trying to wrok with all adds up to a big communication pile up. The solution you ask?  A form.  One simple Microsoft Excel form.  It was all as simple as sitting down next to them, seeing that they had a form that they used for thier own internal process  that had all of my ordered pieces on it, with all of their codes on it, the quantity ordered and the price, and  . . .yes, a photo next to each item so I would at long last know what they are making for me.  So all I had to do was fly over here, sit down at a table with them, see a form in the folder they have on me, and point to it.  That resolved virtually all of our problems.  now they are going to send me this form so I can see all my orders clearly, and then I can in turn use this very same form, add my own photos to it of piecesI need made and send it back to them.  Fascinating  reading I am sure.  But in my world, it was a watershed moment. . . .keep in mind I have a degree in art history, so these sort of solutions to international business relations are not self evident to me.  I was looking for deeper cultural understanding as a bridge to communicating with the local artisans in an effort to elicit mutual benefit and prosperity for all.  Brilliant.  All we really needed was a form.

The rest of the day was spent driving around town on my scooter looking for other ceramics dealers.  The hard part there is, most of the people that have shops in town with interesting stuff are not the actual manufacturers, so to buy from them, I would be paying at least twice what the production price is, which doesn’t make sound business sense, even to a guy with an art history degree like myself.  So the trick is to try and find out where the pieces are being made.   I got lucky with one shop who off the cuff mentioned a city in Thailand that is becoming well known for making more upper end ceramics, more of an artisans production area.  This will take a little research on my part, talking to people here and back home in my business, as well as over here, but for my business this was a good step.  This is the process of finding new places to go, new sources to work with.  So that was good news.

Later in the evening it was back to the Nigh Bazaar.  There are a couple shops in there that have some wonderful Northern Lao and Southern Chinese silver tribal jewelry.  The pieces have these great forms and nice simple embossing, but they are quite expensive because they are the real thing.  Now right next to these couple dealers are other dealers with new pieces by the same tribes that are half the price.  This is not an unusual situation.  On the one hand, if you put the oldpiece with the new piece it is easy to tell the difference and to justify the price.  On the other hand, if I sell the new pieces in my shop and don’t have the older nicer and more expensive ones next to them, the new piece will look quite nice on its own.   Its a standard debate between buying the older more expensive, but better looking piece verses the reproduction.  I always lean toward the older piece, but sometimes it is a difficult decision when the new piece or reproduction (I wouldn’t call these a reproduction because the tribes still use the jewelry to this day) is well done.  This is such a case.  Normally in these situations the reproduction is being done in a place far removed both physically and in time from the original - most likely in some factory rather than in a village one hundred years ago.  In this case, its the same people in the same village making the same thing - just with a little lower quality silver, and a little less refinement in the work.  But is it worth the price difference to someone standing in my store not seeing the two next to each other? So I have to spend the day chewing this one over.  

Today is going to be a fun day.  I am off to this village outside of Chiang Mai to talk to a few favorite vendors of mine.  One deals in great Burmese antiques - deco chairs, vitrines, pieces out of Pakistan for some reason, and other collections of antiques and artifacts.  Next is a dealer that harvests fallen trees throughout Northern Thailand and turns them into these great big plank dining and coffee tables, as well as takes the large part of the root of trees - the part that is right below the trunk, and turns them into beautiful buffets and small tables.  Its hard to describe, but I will try and get a photo up of them - they actually have a very modern look to them because these people “square off” the sides of the root system by running them through a huge saw, so you have this juxtaposition of a flat cross section of the root that shows the great grain of the piece countered by the rawness and randomness of the roots running “inside” the flat surfaces of the piece . . .really a picture will help quite a bit in his case.  Lastly it off to another dealer who takes again dead pieces of wood and turns them into sculpture either by waxing the wood or bleaching it.  They also take old farm implements and put them on stands turning those pieces into sculpture as well (see the farm tillers on the web site as an example).  then dinner, and then back to the Night Bazaar to figure out the Lao and Chinese jewelry purchases, as well as some other little things.