Fire Mountain Gems and Beads

Marge and Earl’s “Hong Kong Fling”

Dear Chris and Stuart,

Remember when we spoke at the Tucson show about going to Hong Kong? You encouraged us, saying that it was a beautiful city and one of your favorites in the world. Well, we went. It’s an amazing place. Earl was there when he was in the Navy, and says he doesn’t recognize it today. We decided to combine a vacation with a business trip. We know that a lot of pearls and gem beads come from there. Earl remembered that the restaurants and hotels were cheap. Not anymore. They are about twice as expensive as at home. Finding the jewelry district was the easy part. Finding people who spoke English and would let us into their companies was more difficult. We showed them our bead store credentials and told them that we were big buyers.

A lot of the companies wouldn’t let us buy a few “samples” that we could take with us. We had to order based on what we could see hanging from their walls. Some places had minimums that were too large, but others let us buy reasonable quantities. The prices seemed very good and the variety was staggering.

We actually got in one day of vacationing. We went to Disneyland there. The Chinese kids having fun were adorable. We also took the cable car to the top of Victoria Peak, but it was too hazy to see much. Mailing merchandise from abroad is not the same as mailing locally. Since we have been back home, we have learned more than we ever wanted to about tariffs, customs brokers, the Fish and Wildlife Service, scientific names and a whole lot of other stuff. We went through all the importation procedures, step-by-step. When we finally got our shipments (some took over a month), we found most of them were okay. But some of them had wrong quantities and others extreme variations in product quality which we would have liked to return had it been possible.

Earl kept saying, “This is all worth it – look at all the money we saved.” I said, “Ok, how much did we save?” Earl compared those products that were the same as what you sell against your 200+ price category, which we generally get. He found that we saved money on some things, but on about 2/3 of the items you were about the same price or cheaper. And on your stuff, we could buy only as many as we needed and we would have received it in 3-4 days, and we would have gotten accurate counts of consistent quality beads and we wouldn’t have had to go through that mess with Customs.

So, we’ve had our fling, and it was fun, but the thing we’ve learned is that it’s not worthwhile trying to beat your quality or prices. Give your buyer-people a heartfelt hug from us — we've learned what they go through.

Lots of love,
Marge and Earl
Michigan

This is the kind of letter that we love to receive. Marge and Earl, we know that letters like yours are hard to write, but we thank you sincerely for doing so, and for letting us share it. Our product sourcing people spend their lives running all over the world, trying to find new and better products, better quality, better prices – they sometimes wonder if their efforts are appreciated. Letters such as this give them new inspiration.

Happy Beading!

Love,
Chris and Stuart