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The dZi staff recently returned from our last tradeshow of the season, Natural Products Expo East, located in the Boston Convention Center. Over 21,000 natural foods industry members snacked a lot on the newest yummy natural foods treats, tasted all the new gummy vitamins, and sampled lots of lip balm from the over 1500 booths. The Fair Trade Holiday booth #1420, positioned at the epicenter of the tradeshow where 'Health & Beauty' meets 'Natural Living', enjoyed good traffic. Our Fair Trade Holiday line was chosen & featured in the 'Saturday's Editor's Picks' on the official show blog, the Natural Foods Merchandiser! We were excited to see our old friends and customers as well as make more contacts in the growing natural food market. We also met with some of our Reps Ed Christian (Miami Beach) and Cherron Perry-Thomas (PA) Now we are on to the next big things: Shipping orders - our warehouse is jammed with product, and we are shipping out as fast as we can enter addresses- and planning for our new catalog. (Drum roll...) 2010 is our 20th anniversary! Look for more celebratory blogs and announcements. Until next time, happy travels!
All,
THANK YOU EVERYONE...
I would like to once again thank Carmen for her efforts! We were very excited to be a part of the first ever trade show Fair Trade Pavilion, realizing a dream that we have shared with other fair-traders for several years. I loved being able to point out the huge FTF logo banner flying high over the aisle as a sky-mark to buyers. And most of all, I loved being in close proximity with Fair Trade members, all who share a vision of seeing the world made fair. The deciding factor for us to attend the LA gift show was to be a part of history in the making and join with other FTF members in this historic event.
OUR SUCCESSES!
We debuted our new Holiday 2009 product and and had very positive response from retailers regarding our Fair Trade Holiday line, new sterling and gemstone jewelry, notecards, wine bags and mini-singing bowls. We returned to the LA show with the hope of re-establishing connections with west coast buyers in a more exciting venue. We were successful in doing just that; it was great to see some of our old friends who don't make it to east coast shows! Orders are still coming in from people we met at the show. We saw Kathy Krassner from Giftware News magazine; she will be featuring our new sustainable lokta paper Kite Card in the next issue. In a venue of cash and carry and LA veterans, Tibet Collection Wholesale stood out as unique and attracted a broad spectrum of buyers.
CHALLENGES
We had our work cut out for us as a primarily order-writing business. Challenges included the shift in ownership of the California Gift Show and the much reduced size of the show, the challenging economy (both west coast and in general) and the focus on cash and carry and one-of-a-kind folk art, and the expense of travel and freight to the west coast, and our 'newbie' status. Whew! Thank goodness for swimming pools, movie stars and mojitos!
LOOKING AHEAD
As I write this, we are in the midst of prepping for NYIGF coming up Aug15-19, and Natural Products Expo East, (Boston, Sept 24-26). I hope one day Tibet Collection Wholesale will participate in a future Fair Trade Pavilion in both shows! We are working on our new 2010 catalog and the concurrent website content, with web2.0 blogging and SEO upgrades. We are really excited to be seeing our FTF friends again in NYC and wish everyone a successful show.
Here are a list of fellow Fair Trade Federation Members that were at the show:
Banyan Paper
Bridge for Africa
Cheppu Himal
Handmade Expressions
Inter-American Trading
Manos de Madres
Matur Suksema
One World Projects
Sevya
Spiral Foundation
Swahili Imports
Zen Zen Home & Garden
Jacque, Design/Marketing Director
dZi Inc
Fair Trade Holiday
Tibet Collection
