Buenos Dias

[Artcamp SC de RL]

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”