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 won’t 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”