Selling Thai Furniture direct to Europe - Practical?

[tebee]

My Chinese born wife has been helping some non-Chinese speaking Thai-Chinese friends arrange some export sales of Thai/Burma teak and Afzelia xylocarpa furniture and carved panels to China.

Now having seen what they are doing, she wants to spend her commision from those sales on buying some furniture herself and us trying to do the same thing to Europe.

Now although I can see some good points in this, she has been with them to the wholesalers up in Mae Sot and know where to get good stuff cheap, they are quite happy to add things on to their orders for her so she can get volume discounts, I think the problems are going to arise selling it.

Firstly we can't afford to buy container loads like they are doing. They also have a conveniently empty factory just outside Bangkok ( they lost the machinery in it in the floods and now buy in from China instead). I'm sure how much of this sort of stuff is to European tastes and I suspect we will need much more paperwork to import it to Europe - The redwood, which I believe to be the Afzelia xylocarpa I mentioned, is both incredibly heavy and possibly an endangered species.

Also, I have no trade contacts here to sell it to, while I do have a workshop with enough space to store a container load, I live out in the wilds of rural France - Passing trade is going to be limited to a few farmers. I run my own business as well and I'm trying to spend half my time in Thailand so I will not be here to sell things.

So the only option I can see is for her to sell direct from Thailand using Ebay and/or her own website. But that means finding some not to expensive and reliable method of shipping Thai/Europe. I know there are agents who specialize in shipping tourist's large purchases back to their own country, but I'm not sure how to find a good one.

So my question, when I finally get around to it, is there anyone here who has tried/considered anything similar? Would the losses and breakages make such a plan unworkable, and how do we find a good way to ship?

T

[i claudius]

I know someone who tried it ,want to buy some furniture? it just was not worth it ,he lost a lot of money.

[bluebluewater]

I hope you get some responses to your thread as I have wondered about this myself. A lot of that furniture is just so beautiful that is would command a pretty penny in western countries.

I would think it would not be easy to get the permits to ship the woods being used into another country. I don't know how you could do using Ebay or internet and trying to do it one piece at a time. I think the costs and the prices that would have to be charged would make that near impossible. Container loads would seem to be the way to go but I cannot imagine the headaches that would create.

I'll look back in on this thread and see what others might have to say.

[i claudius]

As i said before a friend sent over container loads ,in the end it was very difficult to sell the furniture and the prices he had to charge to make a profit just made it not worth while , he still has most of it years later.

[edwinchester]

As i said before a friend sent over container loads ,in the end it was very difficult to sell the furniture and the prices he had to charge to make a profit just made it not worth while , he still has most of it years later.

Sounds like a guy I know. Is his name EW?:-) Lovely furniture but just not worth it.

[tebee]

I too had a friend's husband who tried importing by the container load some years ago, although from Indonesia in his case. He managed to lose most of a sizable inheritance doing it, although he did make some fundamental mistakes.

His worst one was he intended to sell direct to the public, but rented a unit on a business park rather than a retail park. Found out later his lease forbade him advertising as being open to the public there, so he was limited to trade sales and word of mouth. He was going to try online sales from there, I'd offered to help him set up an online shop, but I think he lost enthusiasm.

Eventually sold it all on to the trade for a fair profit, but not enough to cover the two years rent and rates on his unit. Never went back to get more after the original load.

Quality was variable and this was after he went over picked the individual items and overseen them being pack into the containers.

The second alternative we considered was shipping individual items over to resell from here, shipping charges are not horrendous 35$ per m³ to France and 30$ to UK, but we sill have to pay for shipping agents charges, import duty, taxes and shipping from the port on top of that, which means you end up with a lot more capital sunk in each item that you have to try to recover.

Which is why we are looking at selling direct on ebay. Not a huge amount of capital, it's the buyers responsibility to pay the duties. If we but one item at a time, take photos of that item then people can see exactly what they are getting. I've not sat down to do the sums yet, but I think we should be able to offer items for about 50% more than we pay in Thai plus postage and still make a reasonable profit for the time and money invested. But this does mean keeping transit losses and subsequent refunds down to a reasonable level and I've not found any way of shipping items heavier that 30K yet.

I want to start small and see how it goes. If it fails we have not lost too much money, if it goes well we can try expand later.

I don't think individual imports will be effected by the EU " due diligence" regulations on importing timber. I'm not sure how we would do if we needed to was most was using reclaimed teak.

Which they then turn into these

[happynthailand]

the only trouble that we have found is that wooden furiture ( the 40,000B-90,000B carved tables) that are made in thailand,

after its been in the states for a while, or if its very hot in the shipping container(summertime) they tend to dri out and crack

makes the people who you sold it to very un-happy

shipped 3 container loads to the states,made good money,

we gave it up to much of a hassle

[khunsuar]

No one has mentioned if the wood has been properly seasoned, either air or kiln dried. Shipping from the tropics to a more arid and or colder climate invites disaster as the wood will crack, check and generally misbehave.