Importing from Bali by Suitcase

The Suitcase Importer

And I’m not talking about people who import suitcases. For our purposes, a “suitcase importer” is a person who visits Bali and leaves with a suitcase, bag or backpack full of products with the intention of selling them somewhere else.

It’s the fun end of importing.

Suitcase Importers go to exotic destinations like Bali, Thailand, the Philippines and Goa, stay for a while and travel around and then, before flying out, fill up a case with small products that can be easily carried and sold elsewhere.

Years ago, I met people who did only this. They crisscrossed Asia: in Thailand one month, then Tokyo for a week to sell the products and possibly pick up casual work, then off to the Philippines for a month, learning to dive and doing a little travelling then filling a suitcase, then to Hong Kong to sell products and look for work, then to Bali and Java, travelling, exploring, filling a case, then off to Australia and so on and so forth.

Sometimes for a few months. Sometimes for a year. Sometimes never to return. A kind of Endless Summer without the surfboards… unless they were buying surfboards to sell.

In the early 90s, most of the people I met suitcase importing tended to be of a similar type. They were relatively young and carefree, often on a ‘gap year’ between university and real life. They woke up mid-afternoon, smoked, drank, partied, wore flip-flop sandals, very strange trousers and tye-died or batik tops.

They talked about LIFE, the SOUL, the FULL MOON. They stayed at bottom-end guest houses and hostels (hostiles, we used to call them) and did not smell fresh.

A new breed of suitcase importer…

From the end of the 90s and, I started to meet a greater variety of suitcase importer… some were simply on holiday and wanted to bring home some of the products; others were small business people — they would arrive, buy and be gone within a week. In other words, the sole purpose of their trips to Bali or Thailand would be product hunting.

I would assume the new breed of suitcase importer arrived with the proliferation of cheap transatlantic flights and discount airlines that have been filling up the skies for the past few years. In other words, flights to Asian destinations became so cheap that an American could plan a trip to Asia and know they would be spending little more than if they’d stayed home. To put that in perspective, you can stay in Bali or Thailand on fifty to one hundred dollars a day and live like a King or a Queen – that’s including a nice place to stay, excellent food (at nice restaurants) and doing pretty much whatever you want. In New York, Los Angeles or London, you can spend fifty dollars by lunchtime without really having to think about it.

And, even better, you can drop down the level of accommodation in Bali and Thailand, eat more simply and spend even less. Now it may not be literally as cheap as staying home but, even once you’ve counted the money you’ve spent on a flight, it is considerably cheaper than most holiday destinations closer to home.

An example of one suitcase importer in Bali…

I know one guy, a Canadian, who has been doing this for years. He has a permanent stall in a flea market in a Canadian city. Every year, certain points, the sales slow down. I’m not one hundred percent sure as to why the sales slow down – maybe it gets cold or maybe it’s that dip we all experience between the Summer tourism and the Christmas sales and the dip in January or in April.

Whatever the reason and whatever the season, at these times, he grabs a small backpack, throws in some light clothes and a camera and flies out to Thailand.

In Thailand, he visits jewelry suppliers in Bangkok he knows well, orders some stones and crystals that he likes, maybe spends a day or two relaxing up North, in Chang Mai, before returning to Bangkok, picking up his stones and then jumping on a flight to Bali. From the airport in Bali, he grabs a taxi for about three dollars or, sometimes, walks to Kuta (it’s only a few minutes away) and checks into one of the very cheap losmen or cheap traditional style hotels he’s been using for the past few years – the type of place that runs around eight dollars per night. If you’re not familiar with losmen, you might want to check out these images on google before you book one… they’re not for everyone.

First thing the next morning, delivers the stones to one of the jewellery crafts people he works with in Celuk along with a cash deposit,and pictures of the models of jewellery that he wants.

Start to finish, the order will take ten to fourteen days. Every third or fourth day, while the order is in progress, he’ll hop in a taxi or on a rented motorbike to visit the craftspeople and check on his order. The rest of the time is his – he spends a lot of it at the beach, slowly turning a deep, deep brown. Every evening, he will be at the ocean front, drinking one or two beers and watching the sun go down. Occasionally, he’ll stop into a cybercafé somewhere in Kuta to see how people are doing back in Canada and double check in case there are any new orders for jewellery. At the end of the second week, he goes back to the crafts people, double checks his products, pays the outstanding balance, brings it all back to the losmen, packs it into his empty suitcase, weighs it to make sure he’s within his fifteen or twenty kilo limit and heads back to the airport.

Just to be super clear: fifteen to twenty kilos of silver, gold and otherwise precious jewellery is a lot of jewellery and represents a lot of potential profit. If he spends two to three thousand just on the rings, pendants, bracelets, chains and assorted knick-knacks, he may be able to turn that around for between ten and twenty thousand on the Canadian side at his permanent stall. So, from where he’s sitting, the flights, hotels, trips to the beach and to the spa cost him absolutely nothing. He has, I think you’ll agree, a good system. He gets to travel to warm, fun and exotic places at least twice a year, some years he’ll manage four trips and come home to make profits.

On the next page, I’ll go into some ideas about where to go in Bali and what to buy.