Teresa Nielsen Hayden eliminates the middleman:
Posted by DeLong at November 9, 2004 01:34 PM | TrackBackMaking Light: Salwar kameez: I’ve successfully tested a proposition: You can commission traditional garments from tailor shops in India and Pakistan, via eBay....
You start by going to eBay and typing in a search string like women clothing salwar sari. This puts you in the land of Indian-subcontinent clothing makers. Now, the conceit of eBay is that it sells existing concrete objects; but if these guys sell you a salwar kameez (that is, the traditional Indo-Pakistani pantsuit plus matching dupatta or stole), and you send them the list of measurements they request, out of the kindness of their hearts they’ll throw in all the cutting, sewing, embroidery, etc., required for a complete outfit made to your measure.
I’m all for this. It means you can buy semi-directly from Third World suppliers, instead of having several rounds of importers and wholesalers taking their percentage along the way. The range of products on offer is wider, because you’re not limited to whatever some importer guessed would sell in the United States this season. And if these small manufacturers make good money by selling us good stuff, we’ll not only be happier with each other, but we’ll be real to each other in a way we weren’t before....
The base price for a made-to-order three-piece salwar kameez starts around $30 for something simple in a cotton or synthetic fabric, and goes up to the lower-middle three digits for wedding garments so dense with gold embroidery that they mess up flash photography. Shipping runs around $12-$25, so check before you bid....
All three purchases arrived within two weeks. All three fit.... Indiashop1 is my favorite so far.... I’d do it again. I’d deal with any of those vendors again. And I’d recommend it to a friend.
Disintermediation, n'est pas?
This should be frightening to the rag trade, and of concern to Wal-Mart, etc.
btw, Tom Freston (now co-high priest at Viacom) got his start importing Indian clothing back in the dark ages.
Posted by: fatbear at November 9, 2004 01:58 PMDelong, are you advocating economic warfare against those that would profit from Shrub's tax cuts by shipping even more jobs abroad? Hmm maybe I can feel comfortable about believing in comparative advantage. But realistically, do we really believe Walmart will not try to distort tariffs to protect us from importing directly cheap stuff? For example these goods from India and China won't have a Religious Imprimatur or the Christian Seal of Approval. Somewhat like the missing Christian Seal of Approval for meds imported from Canada.
Posted by: CSTAR at November 9, 2004 02:03 PMThe jobs are going to get shifted whether we buy the clothes from India ourselves, or if Wal-mart does it.
By cutting out the middleman, you share the profit between yourself (in the form of even lower prices) and the manufacturer (who's getting a better price than WM would give) in whatever amounts you agree to via ebay.
Posted by: Fred at November 9, 2004 02:43 PM... but but but, isn't the purpose of the American economy to enrich the owners of Wal-Mart and the like? :-]
Posted by: Jean-Philippe Stijns at November 9, 2004 03:01 PMDisintermediate the SOBs into oblivion.
I do real work. I produce some desirable commercial goods. I concretely and demonstrably make some other goods more commercially desirable, and more valuable to their end users. Let the pointy-haired boss who makes ten times my salary say as much. Same goes for every privileged bastard who's trying to reinstitute the class system because rent-seeking behavior is his only area of professional expertise.
Hoopla.
Posted by: Teresa Nielsen Hayden at November 9, 2004 07:36 PMI see it as the difference between shopping at a farmer's market or shopping at a chain supermarket with abominable labor practices. I can avoid the supermarket without wishing ill to their suppliers, who probably get enough ill as it is.
Along those lines, devalifewear.com sells clothes made by collectives in third world countries, and this link leads to yarn and accessories made in Nepal of recycled sari silk by, again, a collective.
I'm not comfortable with the aggressive push toward outsourcing because as currently practiced it removes the investment US businesses have traditionally had in seeing that our own children are educated to the point of being able to function in a global economy and depresses wages while not improving life for more than a small fraction of the citizens of the country we're outsourcing to (and damages more through loose industrial environmental and labor protections).
I'm not sure there's a dichotomy there.
Posted by: julia at November 9, 2004 08:30 PM