IL Postcard

If You Like Travel…and You Love to Shop…

Date: 02/24/2007

International Living Postcards-- Sunday Edition

Sunday, Feb. 25, 2007

Years ago, I arrived at our office in Quito, Ecuador, to find the place, both floors, stacked with baskets and boxes, carved wooden santos and handmade musical instruments, hand-stitched dresses and brightly embroidered table linens…

When I inquired, our office manager explained that a reader had asked if she could use the office for temporary storage. All the handicrafts? The fruit of her most recent buying trip in the country.

Evidently, this entrepreneurially inclined reader was making a business of importing the work of Ecuador's craftsmen back to the States. She'd started, one trip, by carrying a few small pieces of art back in a suitcase…which friends of her mom had snapped up without hesitation. Encouraged, the reader returned to Ecuador, this time filling two suitcases…with indigenous treasures that, back home, she placed with a small arts gallery.

Fast forward a few months…and the reader found herself with enough demand through the resale outlets she'd established to warrant the shopping spree that had resulted in the piles, baskets, and boxes of art and crafts that greeted me that morning I opened the door to the office in Quito.

I rarely take a trip that doesn't turn up something interesting…something special selling for a fraction what I know it'd sell for someplace else. Antiques, furniture, olive oil, hammocks, blankets, jewelry, photographs…

I've never followed through on any particular opportunity…and am always envious of others who do--a friend's husband who has launched a growing business importing Nicaraguan pottery into the States…another friend importing antiques from the UK…

Why not, we wondered, gather together all our friends and contacts who have demonstrated their import-export smarts…to show readers how to do what these import-export entrepreneurs are so successfully doing?

So, that's what's happening July 12-14 in Nicaragua (the perfect setting for such an event, with each pueblo blanco boasting a unique treasure that sets it apart from the rest). This one-of-a-kind program will help you turn your love of travel, adventure, and shopping into a fun, lucrative business. For advance details, e-mail Events@InternationalLiving.com.

Kathleen Peddicord
Publisher, International Living

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