Buenos Dias
Artcamp SC de RL
artcamp at artcamp.com.mx
Wed Nov 7 14:41:30 PST 2001
Buenos Días. Receive greetings from our rural womens artisans cooperative
in Guerrero México.
Our road as women artisans in the Third World has not been easy in the past
years it is hard.
we do NOT mind working because it is honest, and necessary in order to
support our families.
It is still more difficult to sell our products sometimes, because of the
costs of reaching the customers;
to make a single telephone call to the United States for 20 minutes costs
us what we earn in a days work.
For this reason we sell mostly to wholesalers, because they purchase our
products in larger quantities
but we have to have orders constantly, because there is not much profit for
us at the prices we sell at.
Sometimes it happens that the wholesalers do not pay us at all they just
refuse or wont answer our calls;
this does not happen very often but it does happen and this is very costly
to us and makes us go backwards.
We have been trying to reach the market more directly and so we have
developed a website for that purpose;
but the Internet site by itself does not solve the problem of how we may
sell directly to retailers in the market.
Our idea is to perform the part of the wholesaler who sells our product to
the stores at profit; however good
may be his or her intentions there is necessity to pay salaries and
overhead and U.S. taxes and travel expenses
Wholesalers have to pay all these costs somehow in order to keep on in
business. We are the producers;
we are the producers themselves, we transform the materials into the
finished product: handcrafted jewelry.
the key to our success will be to get a lot of orders to keep down the
shipping expense per kilo
that way we can ship the product to small customers in a single large
container, that is the key.
We are going to make an effort to solve the problem of our isolation from
the market
by creating the wholesaler function at the end of our village-based
production system
You can be very important in helping this project to succeed; if Artcamp
can make the step up
to becoming our own wholesalers, then we can get stronger and make a
success for everybody.
THANK YOU for taking the time to read this message. You can see our
pictures modeling our own creations http://www.artcamp.com.mx/XA/18.html
and working in our shop http://www.artcamp.com.mx/FG/c13.html
Atentamente,
Areli, Luz, Yolanda, Hilaria, Tamara, María, Angelica, Esperanza, Rocio,
Minerva.
and the other women of our cooperative ARTCAMP SC de RL Artesanas Campesinas
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