Detail on Finding Buyers (new thread)

I would like more micro detail on finding buyers for imported products.

We currently sell gift and souvenir products to about 300 independent gift
retailers of various descriptions. Finding a line that will sell in enough
volume to justify a container load (or fractional) seems on the surface to
be a daunting task. First, gift retailers are very provincial on a "state"
basis. As soon as you try to sell a product made in another state, sales are
cut in fourths. Your best opportunity is with something they cannot find
in-state (not that hard, fortunately.) Second, every gift retailer wants
something different. If Betty (most of these store owners are women) down
the street carries that line, then "I don't want it." While this creates
opportunities for new, competing lines, it also reduces the opportunity to
get serious volumes of just about anything. (Also please understand we work
in the rural northern Rockies and east of the Cascade mountains (interior
Northwest US) where the BIG city has 30,000 +/- people).

I understand that finding an unmet need, and selling based on "design" is
necessary, we do that all the time. But what kind of minimum volumes would
we need to make importing viable? I can see where we could get samples, go
around and take orders, noting delivery some weeks or months hence. But
seeing that most of these are one-store businesses, most are located in
smaller towns (low to modest volumes), and the fact that its tough to sell a
line to more than one store in a town, and most of the stores will not be
interested in a particular line, what are the options? What is an economic
minimum production quantity, say in your specialty of glassware, John? What
volume of orders would you need before you would work your magic with a
foreign manufacturer? How much work would it be to aggregate different lines
from a foreign country (assuming I could pre-sell a range of products) to
make a container (or fractional) container load?

Distributors are not a dominant force in the gift industry, at least not in
Idaho and eastern Oregon. So finding a volume buyer is like locating a
four-leaf clover. For retail chains, most of the purchasing is
centralized... in Seattle, Portland, Denver, etc and we do not circulate, or
have contacts in those networks. We could develop those of course, but we
would prefer to take advantage of the buying power we already work with. We
travel a lot to make a living in this part of the world, ... more travel is
not our preference.

Not sure if I am making my question clear. Even though we work with hundreds
of buyers (and a database of nearly 2000), the size of buyers we work with
makes "finding a buyer" in economic volumes, a challenge. Suggestions?
Concerns? What strategy would you use for importing, if your biggest asset
was access to a wealth of micro-buyers?

Malcolm

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