A tiny incident happened at the gift show I was at last week. A buyer with no badge appeared on the floor during set-up and offered to buy the entire booth to “take it off our hands” at the end of the show. This confused me at first. I was part of a group booth with twelve artists, she hadn’t even looked at our work. It sounded to good to be true. And it was. Too good to be true, that is.
After a lot questions, sleuthing and detective work on the part of the show staff, and some shared experience from other booth members, we found out the buyer was a legitimate buyer with a storefront(though she was not officially registered with the show and should not have been on the floor during set-up). And it is a “common practice” for some buyers to buy an exhibitor’s entire line of samples and stock at a wholesale show.
What’s the catch?
Oh, just a little one. The check is for just half your WHOLESALE price.
And if you are a professional craftsman, it's not likely you'll be bragging about where your work is sold.
I learned that this is one way those discount stores—Christmas Tree Shop, Building 19, T.J. Maxx, etc.--get merchandise at such rock-bottom prices. They buy the samples from vendors directly off the floor. The vendor recoups HIS wholesale cost and doesn’t have to pack up and ship the samples. Sounds like win-win for everyone, right?
Well, unless YOU are the artist.
This might be an attractive deal to someone who’s just received a small boatload of mass-produced knick-knacks from some overseas factory where women and children work for pennies a day. It might even be attractive to a rep for a small women’s knitting cooperative in Africa, giving them enough hard cash to stay in business another few months, and enough hope to keep them going.
The buyer was pretty clueless how this would sound to those of us in the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen, or to any maker of fine contemporary American Craft. What’s worse, some in our group struggling to make some connection—ANY connection—with a potentially good venue, could have found this straw worth clutching at. And then found their handwork in such a store next to souvenir T-shirts and imported plastic memorabilia.
It was a wake-up call for me, too.
Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE a bargain. Everyone does.
But what does the “bargain” really cost us?
When the work of our hand, the work of ANYONE’S hand, is no longer about what’s beautiful, what’s unusual, what’s useful, and is ONLY about how cheap it is...where does that particular journey take us?
There's cheap because it's been used before, cheap because it's not meant to last as long, cheap because it's last year's model. There's cheap because someone has streamlined their operations and can cut their profit margins, cheap because it's not as well-made, cheap because no one else wanted it.
But this kind of "cheap" scares me. And it should scare the little coop in Africa, too.
Because next year, the new coop in some other country will be selling it just a little bit cheaper, too. This kind of "cheap" has no bottom to its well. The buck won't stop there.
