Starter Kit. Idea 172 of 500. Cluster 7
Trade-fair representation: one stand at the Frankfurt, Dubai or Tokyo fair shared by 20 producers
The mechanism, from the book
The tiny business pathway. A rural woman with an exceptional product should not need photography, English copy, packaging design and a distributor before the world can find her.
The first step
Look up the cost of a small stand at one trade fair, in Frankfurt, Dubai or Tokyo, and divide it by 20. Write that number, plus travel and shipping, on one page. Show it to 25 small producers and ask whether they would each pay their share for you to represent their products on the stand. When 20 have paid deposits, book the stand.
- Who pays first
- A small producer who could never afford a stand alone but can afford one twentieth of one.
- What leaves today
- Island producers rarely meet foreign buyers face to face, so they sell to middlemen who take their goods to the fairs instead.
Ask first
- Sri Lanka Export Development Board. Ask what help exists for shared stands at trade fairs abroad.
- Department of the Registrar of Companies. Ask how a group of producers can form a company to share costs.
Check before you spend
That the producers sign a contract sharing costs and duties, that products meet buyer rules for each market, and what samples can travel.
Find out these three numbers
- What does one stand at a major trade fair cost?
- How many producers would share the cost?
- How many buyer meetings does a stand produce?
A comparison from the book
New Zealand. Chapter Eleven
"A single desk ends it, and makes it worth spending on brand and quality, because nobody who did not pay can take the benefit."
Selling together stops producers undercutting each other in front of the same buyer.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.