Exportant

[offcntr]

At first I thought it was a scam.

I got an email yesterday saying,

Good morning,
 
I was looking into your website and pottery to see if you had a products that could be of interest to the Japanese market. In particular, we are looking for a few new companies to exhibit in a Gift Show in Tokyo this February 2015.
 
I really like the designs you have and especially the cat and dog mugs and cat bowl. The animal banks could work, too.  (I’m asking our Oregon Japan office for their opinion.)  The Japanese are fanatics about pets because they usually only have one child and pets are well taken care of and pampered.
 
Would you  have any interest in looking into the idea of exporting?  I don’t know if you would be able to make the same product 100x for example to fill an order? 
 
Our agency could help you scale up, expand, provide loans, help with export training, etc.  Just checking your interest level at the moment. 
 
Best regards,
Alexa
 
Alexa B. [redacted]
Global Trade Specialist
Business Oregon
t. 503-xxx-xxxx
[web link] [also redacted]

I've gotten email solicitations about exporting my work before. Usually, the writer claims to be buyer for an overseas gallery or gift store, offering to purchase wholesale quantities at retail prices. The message generally has a generic salutation, a couple of grammatical errors (e.g. "had a products"), and picks a product or two randomly off of my website in a fill-in-the-blank sort of way.

When I do research online, I usually find out that other craftspeople have received identical solicitations. Anyone foolish enough to reply winds up down a rabbit hole that ends with them paying shipping with a traveller's check to the buyer's preferred shipper after taking payment from a credit card number that later turns out to be fraudulent. They're on the hook to the (fake) shipper, who, to add insult to injury, never picks up the product.

So I Googled the sender's name. Surprise, no hits on Vendor Beware sites. The link comes back Page Not Found, but on an actual Oregon government website. The phone number turns out to be a legitimate State of Oregon office number for the person who signed the email.

Holy cow, this one seems to be real.

So how do I politely tell her I'd be crazy to say yes?

Let's start with the products she chose, cat/dog handled mugs and animal banks. Can I say everybody chooses animal mugs and banks? My first gallery experience, down on the central Oregon Coast, wanted animal mugs and banks. My second gallery in Northern California wanted animal mugs and banks. And when Made in Oregon decided they wanted to give me a wholesale order for all of their Oregon outlets, what did they want? You guessed it, animal mugs and banks.

Let me tell you a secret: Animal mugs and banks don't sell all that well. I sell maybe one or two a month, total, banks and mugs. Painted soup bowls would be a much better choice, or coffee mugs, but cute wins out over beautiful in the store buyer's eye every time. Incidentally, both of those galleries have gone out of business, and Made in Oregon never re-ordered.

The only reason I keep them in the booth is nostalgia, really. I used to have two dozen varieties of banks, five or six different animal-handled mugs. I've trimmed it down to the patterns that still sell reliably, and keep them for old customers and old time's sake.

But even if she could sell them--and I admit Japan may well eat them up, what do I know?--I couldn't produce them. The items she chose happen to be the highest-labor pots in my booth. Every one has a wheel-thrown component and hand-built parts. Nothing is slip-cast, nothing mold-made, just fingers, tools and skill. So no amount of loans, business assistance, advice on how to scale up, expand, whatever, gets past the fact that there's only one of me. I could make 100x animal mugs--I did something similar for the Hoedads reunion in 2011--but it would be at the expense of everything else I make. To scale up, I'd have to hire another potter at least as experienced as I am, spend a good amount of time training her to make my pots, then do it all over when she decides to go off on her own and make something more interesting.

And to be truthful, animal mugs and banks are barely worth making to sell at retail prices ($24 and $40 respectively). I've already turned down offers to sell them in my current galleries because with the amount of labor involved, it's just not worth my time to sell them wholesale. Increasing the volume doesn't change that fact.

To make the numbers work, I'd have to have access to a large number of skilled potters willing to work for me at much reduced pay, but with access to a commercial-grade studio and kilns.

In other words, I'd have to outsource them to China.