Another day, another trade fair.

I'm sitting in the Beijing airport, without internet access and mildly hungover, and feeling quite accomplished after a very successful trade fair over the past two days. This close to our launch it was kind of a risk for me to get away for 3 days in order to chase the holy grail of Chinese factory connections, the Beijing Intertex Trade Fair, but I thought it was worth it and it turned out to be just that.

I arrived late Wednesday night, the buses stopped running so I had to pay way too much money to cab it into the city. I was staying with a friend, Eli, so he and his roommate picked me up as the cab didn't drop me off at the correct place. He has an insane old motorcycle with a sidecar, which became my primary mode of transport to and from the fair during those next 24 hours. I woke up the next morning and drove around for a while with Eli in his hog, and it was totally a different way of seeing Beijing. It was so much more real and authentic than my previous trips to Beijing where I was restricted to the dreaded hotel-office-bar triumvirate that any young traveling office monkey has to endure. I was here on business, but I actually enjoyed every second of it as staying with Eli and his roommate, Kro, was such a breath of fresh air (although their apartment is has poor circulation and an abundance of wounded soldiers).

The first day at the fair was kind of a waste, actually. The fair in Beijing is split between two venues, but what they don't tell you in the trade show listing (or maybe I was too lazy to look), split actually means that 95% of the apparel fabrics are at one venue, and 5% are at the other. Sadly, I chose the other for my first day in "the shit." I gathered about 20 different namecards for a variety of DressMonkey ingredients, then quickly scuttled off to Eli's showroom on the corner of the forbidden city. Eli is a distributor for pretty much every skateboard and snowboard or related apparel company looking to sell in China. His showroom, ideally placed and well designed, was the product of a lot of hard work on his part and he deserves all the success that's coming to him at the moment. Though he's got a very tough job, as he's selling premium stuff in a country that loves to duplicate and undercut. After hanging out at the showroom, he and I grabbed a ceremonial Beijing duck, and then he left for the airport on his way to the beaches and ladyboys of Phuket (to see his girlfriend).

On the second day, I rose again, creating nothing but a little gas from the beijing duck the night before. I hurried off to the larger of the two venues and literally talked to 50 or 60 people in 5 hours. When I go to a trade show, its not the vendors who have to do the selling, its me. I've written about this countless times before, but I can't stress it enough about doing business here, China is all about big volumes. Take a look around wherever your sitting now. I bet that at least 50 percent of the clothes your wearing, trinkets in the room, and even your furniture, was made in China. And it wasn't just made for you, everything you own was made at least 40,000 times over by the same factory workers. Factories here don't even know how to count below 1,000, let alone produce in volumes under it. Its just not in their business interests to do so, thus its my job to sell DressMonkey, sell our future potential to these people. Some agree or keep listening, but most do the annoying wave hello (but really goodbye) and say, "Not a chance (bu keneng)." So I have to give the same intro, in Chinese, every single time to every vendor who has something that I think you all will like, and there is a lot that I think you will like at these shows. Another annoying aspect about these trade fairs is that the really good vendors are usually packed with people looking at their fabrics and talking to their salespeople, and the crap ones are always vacant with bored salesmen sitting and playing with their cellphones. Therefore, its especially hard to get and maintain someone's attention when your talking about producing 100-200 meters of this cashmere blend, when some guy named Sergio from Milan wants 100,000 meters of the same thing. Damn you, Sergio, with the hot Italian assistant who looked like Monica Belucci, she will work for me one day!

Once you get past all of these obstacles, the trade show can actually be rewarding. I found a ton of suppliers for our fall line, met some interesting people, and had an absolute great time with Eli and Kro. Last night I went out to Kro's restaurant called, what else but, "The Kro's Nest." He's got the cheapest Guinness draft in China (45 RMB), and probably the best Pizza I've tasted west of the Hudson, its that good. The plane is boarding, and I fear I'm dreading which one of these people I'll have to sit next to for the next two hours on my way back to Shanghai.

Over and Out