Russian Business – Beeg Bead Beezness

May 1, 2009

Irina, mainly out of boredom in Texas, started beading. It was a great idea, she suddenly had something to occupy her time and provide new places to shop daily since the old shopping grounds of the past 4 years were either out of business or not carrying any interesting goods. We had grand plans of bringing this new concept to the backwater, forests of Russia where the average Russian woman probably spends 27 hours a day thinking of how to dress and look good. Jewelry from America should be big hit on the fashionable streets of the ancient capital of the Tsar. So we loaded all of our jewelry stuff into one suitcase, weighing in just a little under the 52 pound max and headed for virgin markets!

Aside from lugging the heavy suitcase, my first concern was customs. Would they let us really bring all this stuff into the country without some kind of business tax or permits? Of course the Americans don’t really mind what you ship out of the country as long as it is not explosive or drugs. And Russians don’t care what you bring into the country, including explosives or drugs. It’s the honor system, in a country that doesn’t understand “honor” or “system”, so you just cruise through the exit that says “Nothing to Declare” without even having to say “I have nothing to declare”. I guess if by some strange chance they should stop you, you could either say “sorry, I made mistake” or hand the guy a twenty move on.

“Potrick, you are such a worrier!” Irina of course scolded me with. So we easily made it through our first hurdle and now all we had to do was line up our material suppliers and set up our selling operation. I could smell “money, Money, MONEY”; or was that the cabbage pirogues they were selling outside?

Our initial concern was where to find the supplies in St Petersburg that we would need to replace our inventory. The sweet lady who gave us lots of advise in Texas said “Oh, don’t worry I am sure you will find everything you need make your beads in Russia. Everyone in the world loves beads!”

“Yeah. But Irina, what about all the small little things we need like wire, connectors, crimps? Have you ever seen that stuff anywhere here in St Petersburg?” Without these small little things it would be impossible to make necklaces or bracelets even if you have all the beads in the world. So as we wandered about the area we kept a keen eye out for places that might sell the things we needed. Our first discovery was accidentally made when searching for thread in a sewing store. While Irina was over at the thread counter waiting in the line to be served I spied what seemed to beads. Not having my correct glasses I couldn’t see behind the counter very well so I walked around the side to get a better look.

“VOT ARE YOU DOING? GET FROM BEHIND MY COUNTER!!!” Came from the other end of the counter as a rather large sales lady immediately stopped her conversation with another customer and rushed at me.

“I am sorry, I am sorry, I just wanted to look closer” as I backed out from behind the counter. But I had made the discovery; “They have beads, not great but will do”. As the sales lady determined that I wasn’t attempting to steal her stuff and she realized that I was a foreigner her attitude softened. I got Irina over and we looked at a few of the items. Prices were cheaper, beads looked cheaper, but very limited selection. This could get to be a boring business if we can only find these few beads to string into our high fashion necklace line.

Later the phone rang. Vicky was on the other end excitedly shouting, “Mama, Mama beads, beads, I found beads!!! You must go to Ploshet Moshet (my translation) there are ladies selling there at the Metro. I also spotted more of them at Chornashefka”. Sounded like we were on to something here now. It was too late to get there today, tomorrow.

The next day we get up early, 9:30. Get breakfast, feed Mamula, wash dishes, make bead, shower, shave, dress and look at my watch. Just as I suspected, my stomach was right. It’s lunchtime. So back to kitchen, find some lunch, feed Mamula, wash dishes and look at my watch. Just as I suspected. “Irina, what time do those bead sellers leave Ploshet Moshet? It’s a one fifteen now.”

“Potrick, 2:00, I think. We must go fast”

“Waiting on you my dear.” Finally we are out the door and walking like we are late to catch a mini bus. Perfect timing we walk up and the bus arrives at the same time. “I think we are going to make it.” About 25 minutes later we arrive at Ploshet Moshet and start looking around. “There! Over There! Looks like a bunch of old women with beads in their hands.”

We found them at 2:01 and unfortunately they were packing up getting ready to leave. “Something about the police, we leetle corrupted them, must leave 2:00 before they return.” Was the rough translation Irina gave me, as she was digging her hands into the last lady’s pile of beads, searching for something, I don’t know exactly what. The last bead lady is starting to get a little anxious, looking around nervously, while trying to get Irina’s arm out of her beads and wrap up the canvas tarp on which the pile of beads laid. At the last moment Irina’s arm surfaces with two or three strands of kinda interesting looking beads. And then the tarp was closed up, put into a big bad and the table quickly folded up. Once the sales operation was shut down the bead seller relaxed, I guess the heat was off when her sales operation stopped. Then she began negotiating with Irina on the 4 strings of beads Irina found interesting.

The prices were a little less than Texas, but not dirt-cheap. But then nothing is ever cheap in Russia, especially now with the Euro and Dollar exchange rate higher. If the item is imported and priced in a foreign currency the Russians raise the price to make up the difference and just to keep things easy to calculate also raise the price of the crappy Russian produced goods. But they were big stones, looked basically OK and the girl said we could exchange them. So Irina buys and the girls are gone.





Once home in a less hurried state and with my double glasses on I could see some minor flaws, nothing major. But we were a little suspicious of these newly found treasures.

So we had located a source of the raw material. Next job; find a marketing outlet. “Irina, there’s always the table out in front of the metro” was my first thought. “Lots of foot traffic and looky lues”. But then we remembered the last couple of times we were at our Metro, there were no vendors; actually seemed deserted and depressing. We kinda looked forward to sifting through those old babushkas’s highly treasured goods imported directly from Finland as a good option to the stores’ Russian or Chinese Production. Finding some entrepreneurial 80 year old lady selling flowers or herbs from her garden shows that the country had really left it’s past behind. We suspected their abandonment of our metro station had something to do with their failure to provide adequate corruption dollars to the appropriate authorities. Anyways looked like the Ozerkie Metro outlet option was closed.

As we nosed around the stores we found some that indeed sold jewelry much like Irina’s. But no one was ready to take on a new “untested foreigner’s” goods. Then by accident we came across a little jewelry kiosk in front of a grocery store we were walking into. Irina struck up a conversation with the lady running the operation. She sounded interested; told us to bring some samples and would see if the boss would also be interested.

“Yes!” A glimmer of hope appeared on Irina’s face. Maybe we can penetrate this difficult market. Next day we took some of our best goods and left them; understanding that the boss would look at them later in the evening to look at them.

Next day, bright and early, we were back at the kiosk. “No, the boss didn’t get by last night, come back tomorrow.” The kiosk lady said. Next day it was the same story. On the third day I was getting a little concerned. As we came up to the kiosk the face of our friendly kiosk lady was missing, replaced instead with some big ruff talking, half bearded, kiosk lady. Irina asks about her jewelry.

“Da, da, da! I have your jewelry. Here, we don’t like it, you take it.” Was the new kiosk lady’s reply as she frowned and slammed the necklaces down on the little counter. I of course didn’t know what was being said, but I got the tone of voice from behind the counter and could see Irina’s face fall to the floor.

As we walked out Irina said. “We will never sell this stupid jewelry here! Why did I bring it all the way here?” Confidence had hit rock bottom.

“Irina, these people just don’t recognize good stuff. I am sure someone will see your talent.” Actually I felt that their jewelry was pretty boring. Generally just one color stone, no imagination, or color coordination and as usual in Russia “the bigger the better”, taste and beauty are unimportant points. But Irina thought their stones were better than ours, not much we could do about that. And of course they had connections, we didn’t

A couple of days later we were in a much more upscale store and saw they also had a small jewelry sales section. Irina immediately got into a friendly conversation and ended up getting a lot of good information about the beesness. Again there was no marketing opportunity; they just bought from some big manufacture that turned out stuff for the masses. But, she told us about the gem and jewelry show in a few days. “Great! There we will see what’s really going on here.” I told Irina.

The day of the big show arrived. Irina gathered up her precious Russian gemstones purchased from the Ploshet Moshet Metro street vendors. Were hoping to trade them on our way to town. Arriving at the metro we looked around and they of course again were nowhere to be found. “Just a bunch of gypsies” I thought. “Oh well we had bigger fish to fry today” and it was onward to the show.

Walking up to the building it didn’t look too big and we really had no idea what we would find. As we entered through the huge, tall doors we were immediately transferred into “bead and gem fantasy heaven”! There were hundreds of booths and tables selling everything imaginable. “O man this is big, we could spend days in here and not see it all” I thought.

“I can’t believe!” Irina exclaimed as she ran for the first booth selling all kind of amber! “Tooooo expensive Potrick”
She exclaimed, moving on to the next booth. Three hours later after doing my “Fighter Sweep” (that’s an old military term meaning quickly check out the situation, find the best targets, attack and move on – a concept not in Irina’s consciousness). Only a few unique booths, rest mostly junk, was my overall impression.

My favorite was a table where the lady was selling stuff from Nepal and Tibet. She spoke a little English, which always segues my impression to “more favorable”. I bought a few little items and thought about discussing going on a buying trip with her husband to those exotic far away places. “Not now, will go to their store and see if it would be possible. That would be really cool.”

“OK, but now I am ready for lunch. Where’s Irina”. Oh still at the booth where I left her at 30 minutes ago. Something about a compulsive need to touch every bead. I could see, convincing Irina that we need to take a break for lunch was not going to be easy.

“Irina, I am getting into a low blood sugar situation, feeling dizzy, I need food. Let’s find the canteen.” I begged.

“I’m coming, Potrick. OH, OH wait. Come look at this!”

“We’re not making any progress,” I thought. “OK, Irina. But then we go to eat. You know how irritated and grouchy I get when I don’t eat on time.” It was the administration office that Irina was standing in front of, looking at the notice for registering to sell at the next exhibition.

“Potrick! Maybe we can set up a table to sell our necklaces at the bead fair next month!”

“Yes that would be great.” I said temporarily forgetting my blood sugar state. “Lets check it out.” As per normal, everyone was on tea break and we couldn’t get any info. So I was in luck. “Irina, we’ll eat and come right back.” Yes I wasn’t going to faint from starvation.

Or so I thought until seeing the canteen food fare. Under the glass appeared various options of unidentified fried stuff, generally accompanied with what appeared to be some kind of cabbage and potatoes. Moving forward the options looked like deliciously greasy sausage, accompanied by a slice of dried looking cheese on stale black bread. “Heh, looks like we are in cholesterol heaven” I thought. Close your eyes and pick curtain A, curtain B, or curtain C. After careful examination I chose chicken cutlet. Well it looked good under the glass counter. What I ended up getting had maybe a ¼ tablespoon of chopped chicken under a cup full of fried stuff. But cabbage and potatoes were normalnie. A little Russian survival food and I was ready for another 10 hours.

After a quick trip to the toilet to try and wash the grease off my hands we’ll head out. “Whoooa, glad I’m not a woman, there must be twenty people lined up to get into the women’s toilet”. Quickly in and out, it’s back to the admin office. “How great would that be to get a booth at the next fair” I told Irina. We were both excited about the prospect. What had been an abandoned area 30 minutes ago was now a beehive of activity. People were lined up at the door. People were writing up booth applications on the side of the walls, on the floor, on anything that was flat. “What’s going on?” I asked.

Irina questioned the guard, there’s always a guard in Russia; he of course knew nothing. Irina finally found someone willing to talk and discovered that all of the booths were taken for the next show. Everyone was filling out the backup applications in the remote chance that someone cancels. Hopes dashed again. Marketing the necklaces from Texas just didn’t appear to be in our cards.

“OH well” Irina said “lets go see if the gemologists are back from their tea break and we can check out our Ploshet Moshet beads”.
Another service kiosk another line, so we wait.

But then an interesting connection materialized, a perky young girl came in behind us holding a handful of necklaces with price tags on them. What is going on here? Turns out she made the necklaces and just wanted the gemologist to confirm that the stones used were indeed the same as advertised when she bought the raw beads. I guess no one can be trusted. While standing there, waiting I prodded Irina to pump her for more information about the bead business. Unlike most Russians she was friendly, outgoing, and openly willing to discuss the beed business. She apparently knows since she had been in the business for 10 years and now had her own store.

This gusher of information was very interesting. “For Russians doesn’t matter if beads are fake, just say they are real and charge the highest price. Russians will buy. If tell Russians you don’t know if real stones, they leave, go buy at next booth where they lie.” Sounded like the normalnie Ruskie marketing plan to me – cheat and lie! Unfortunately other information she revealed painted a bleak picture – it’s impossible to just sign up and get a booth at the show. One needs documents, lots of documents, triple stamped certificates from dozens of government offices, tons of paperwork and then of course a little corruption money before even being considered as a vendor. Navigating any government bureaucracy or corrupting officials is not one of Irina’s talents and Irina has no desire to develop this skill so late in life, so our hopes of Beeg Bead Beezness in Russia dropped another notch.

Irina was really into her discussion and I had to interrupt “Irina, we’re next, lets see if we can get some good news for a change”. Overly optimistic, we walked in and handed the gemologist girl behind the table with microscopes and other laby looking equipment our beads.

She first picked up the sting of amethyst. “This one OK” was the quick answer.

“Hey, that’s a good start!” I whispered to Irina. But then the amethyst was the one string we least suspected of being bogus. Next up was the green string, advertised by the Ploshet Moshet street hawkers as “very expensive Chrysoprase”.

The gemologist girl takes the suspect beads into her hands, carefully feels them, shines some special kind of light through them, puts them under the microscope, confers with her associate. Her serious expression revealed a more difficult prognosis. But then came the verdict. “Glass, all glass, no stone”. And so went the rest of the inspections: our beautiful facetted smoky quartz – glass; our elegant onyx – glass; and so it continued. Walking out the door, we quickly told our sad tale to the perky young girl who had been behind us.

“Normalnie here.” She said.

Well our day at the big bead fair was faring as well as our other attempts at getting a Beeg Bead Beezness in Russia off the ground. We suspiciously looked a little longer at the hundreds of bead strings on the tables and then came to a real anomaly. Two black guys (that’s kinda like African-Russians I guess, which one rarely sees around here and they are often found in the same state as newspaper journalists that criticize the government, that’s dead by accidentally falling out of the 7th floor hallway window when you live on the 4th floor) were manning a table selling only malachite. I figured they had to be honest. We curiously looked, touched, clicked the beads together and thought maybe they were real; they certainly were beautiful and cheap. But our hearts weren’t in it any more; we set them down, walked away and kept on going out the door, headed for home.

As we got off the mini bus in front of our apartment I saw the local little free enterprise zone set up in the parking lot next to our grocery store. Today we had a fish vendor selling fish so fresh they were still struggling to breath, a half a dozen old babuskas selling socks, underwear, slippers, used books, pillow cases, Finnish soaps, mops, brooms, blouses, arts and crafts, etc. “Irina I bet these entrepreneurs didn’t get hundreds of documents and certificates to run their little operation, some corruption money probably. But maybe we should consider a leetel Bead Beezness in Russia.” I half seriously said while thinking about lugging our growing bead inventory back to Texas in 2 suitcases that would now be required.

“Maybe” Irina replied.