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Business Profile: Toka

Guest post by: Toka

Article Overview: Toka co-founder Bob Meyer talks about why he and his wife decided to start their fine African art company and how they have managed to grow it over the past 15 years.

Business Profile: Toka

When I first arrived in Kalabo, Zambia in May 1993, there were people waiting to meet me. My wife Bridget had been to Kalabo only a month earlier.

She had come to Zambia to find wedding baskets. Glen the owner of a decorative accessory store in Minneapolis had told her he could sell 1000 of these wonderful baskets and so Bridget had set off to Zambia to buy them. Over the phone from USA she had been promised by the Livingstone Museum in Zambia that they could sell her the 1000 baskets. When she arrived in Livingstone she found they didn’t have any.

The Livingstone Museum told her to go to the Nayuma Museum in Limulunga. That is where they bought the baskets. When she arrived in Limulunga two days later she found that they only had fifty baskets. In order to find more baskets she was told that she needed to go to Kalabo. The baskets were made in Kalabo.

She took the one day boat trip up the Zambesi River from Limulunga to Kalabo. In Kalabo she found some baskets but her time ran out before she could buy one thousand. She made friends and told them that her husband was coming. She gave them small presents and asked them to be good to me. These were the people who were waiting for me.

My job was to buy baskets. We went to Yuka and Liumba. We bought baskets. The first day in each village we would work with the village headman and announce to as many people as we could that tomorrow Mr Meyer would be in the village to buy baskets. The second day in each village my translator Mwabuko and I would buy the baskets which were brought one by one. In Yuka we bought over 100 baskets.In Liumba I bought 400 in one day. We bought another 200 there only two days later. At that point I moved into a mud wall hut in liumba and stayed with my host the village headman Mr. Mungonge. Over the next week we bought enough baskets to reach our goal of 1000 baskets.With my translator Mwabuko we negotiated for them with the e3xcited villagers one by one. I soon found my 1000 baskets. The villagers were so happy that someone had come to buy their baskets. We also were paying higher prices than they had ever gotten before.

We moved the baskets downstream by boat from Kalabo to Mongu. From there they went by truck (as did I ) to Lusaka. I flew the baskets home with me to USA.

Over the next few years this is how we bought baskets. I or my wife would fly to Zambia and buy as many as we could in a short trip. We started attending various trade shows and sold as many baskets at each show as we could. Sometimes our customers would trust us and order quantities of certain types of baskets based on what they saw at the show. More often the customer wanted the exact basket we were displaying. This caused us to carry large quantities of baskets to each show and to change our display whenever we had sold baskets.

We soon learned to develop product codes for our different types of baskets so that our larger customers could establish sku numbers for our products. We toyed with the idea of injecting our ideas into the basket making process. We did so in terms of size and quantity but decided to leave the concept and creative process entirely up to the weaver. We sought pure art. Our customers supported this idea because they were as numerous and diverse as our customers. We continued to make new customers at the various trade shows and our old customers allowed us more latitude in selecting their purchases as they were confident of the quality we would provide. Some of our larger customers would bend to be flexible enough to carry our product. Many would be customers wished we could provide more consistency in our basket offerings.

We decided to urge the weavers to weave baskets which resembled the basket photos we showed them. The baskets they made were still unique and individual. However these baskets would contain characteristics which matched those in the photos. We hoped this change would make us more feasible to larger customers who might rely on catalog or internet sample photos to sell the baskets.

After 911 and with the invasion of inexpensive Asian made product we found it more difficult to market our product through trade shows. Many of the small retailers who had sold our baskets were no longer in business. The larger retailers concentrated on direct importing from Asia. They came to the shows mostly to get ideas. Our list of old customers began to dwindle.

We decided to study our existing customers who were successfully marketing the baskets and see what drove their success. We learned that they displayed the baskets with integrity and success and were able to convey the story of the baskets and the women who made them.

Over the fifteen years we had had been buying and importing the baskets we had dramatically improved our methods of buying the baskets. We had installed a permanent buying station and were able to purchase the baskets when the weavers wanted to sell them rather than when we wanted to buy them. We also were able to show more patience in our buying. As a both result both the quality and the quantity of the baskets had steadily improved.

We began to look for customers who were capable of purchasing larger quantities of our baskets. We focused on providing education to the sales associates of our customers so they were better able to identify and appreciate the qualities of the baskets which make them so special. We tried to make more information available to our customer regarding the baskets.

Today we continue to give input to the weavers regarding the shapes and sizes of baskets that we desire. We suggest patterns and colors which have sold well. Yet we strive to encourage originality and creativity in the baskets. They have always been artists and we don’t want to stifle their ability to express themselves through the creation of the basket.We want them to continue weaving designs which have personal meanings to them and their families.

Therefore the baskets continue to be woven at the homes of the weavers. They decide when they weave, how much they weave and what they weave. We determine the level of quality only by buying or refusing to buy the basket. Inferior quality baskets which we refuse to buy have in the past found their way into the stores of our customers’ competitors.

We began a system of paying for baskets “up front” with those weavers who had a proven record of making beautiful baskets. As a result the best weavers could be counted upon to weave baskets which they would sell to us.

We currently are able to collect a large inventory of the best baskets in the world. We warehouse them in Zambia and ship them to our warehouse in California. Our inventory includes both new and old used baskets.

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Article Tags: Kalabo, Kalabo Zambia, Limulunga, Livingstone, Livingstone Museum, Nayuma Museum, wedding baskets, wife Bridget, Zambia, Zambia



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