JZ - 8-25-2004 at 10:53 PM
We flew down Wednesday AM early and left Friday PM.
I would highly recommend it to anyone furnishing a home in Baja, mainland, or the US. It exceeded our high expectations. We probably bought enough
stuff to furnish 85% of a 4 bedroom house in about 2 1/2 days. I would guess at 1/4 to 1/3 the price of comparable prices in the US. As an example,
we picked up a massive, massive rot iron chandelier for $1,000 that my wife tells me would list for $7-10K in the valley. At the Expo there were 5
mattress manufacturers, including Sealy, Serta, and Simmons. We got 5 complete sets (king, 2 queens, 2 twins) of the top of the line Sealy for
roughly the price we paid for our king Sterns and Foster we bought a couple years ago.
There were four things going on:
1. Furiture expo at the convention center; you can buy directly from the manufacturer at wholesale pricing
2. EnArt fair: specializing in Mexican handcrafts; you buy directly from the manufacturer at wholesale pricing(http://www.mexicodirecto.com/enart.htm)
3. Hundreds of retail shops of all kinds of tradition mexican furniture and crafts in Tlaquepaque. The EnArt Expo was in Tlaquepaque which is about
15-20 minutes from the furniture expo.
4. A crafts flee-market on Thursdays and Saturdays in Tonala; there are suppose to be 6,000 craftsmen in this suburb (about 15 minutes from
Tlaquepaque).
The furiture expo had a mix of traditional Mexican furniture and modern furniture, with a greater emphasis on modern furniture. This was a little
disapointing, as we were looking for traditional mexican furiture.
Tlaquepaque has some truely awesome shops. But it is retail. But better pricing compared to the US, and stuff you'd never find there.
EnArt was first rate. Art-work, paintings, copper, fixtures, etc. etc. Very low prices ($20 for a huge candle that we saw retailing at a shop for
$80). We got extremely lucky to find a manufacturer at EnArt who had one of the biggest and best retail shops in Tlaquepaque. He (a big time
designer) took us to his shop, spent 2-3 hours with us, and gave us whole-sale pricing ($800 for a marble table I'd guess would sell for $3-4K in the
US).
We never made it to Tonala and didn't get to see everything in Tlaquepaque (it would probably take 3 complete days to see these two). I was a little
disapointed with the main furiture expo (mostly it didn't have as much of the stuff we were looking for). Everyone said that this show was much
smaller compared to the same show in February (they have them every Feburary and August).
We found an exporter, who will work with all the vendors we bought from (about 15) to have the stuff delivered to them in Guadalajara. They will
store it all until we are ready for delivery. They will find the lowest priced shipper for us. For a realatively small fee, they are saving us
endless hours of coordination with dozens of vendors, plus the warehousing, and helping us find the best pricing on shipping! They actually already
saved us a couple hundred bucks by pointing out where two vendors charged us tax when they shouldn't have (this probably covered the cost of the
export services).
We saw what people claim is the world's largest bar. It takes up a whole city block. By the looks of it, I would bet there are thousands upon
thousand of people there on the weekends.
To get into the expo all we did was pre-register on-line and give them our normal work business cards at the show. Only 3 or 4 vendors didn't want to
deal with us or had minimum order sizes.
tim40 - 8-26-2004 at 04:10 PM
Thank you for the Trip report. Most interesting. I have already made a note for the Feb show....now if I can just get my office to cooperate!
Please provide an update along the path of actually getting your items all the way to their new home. Tim
INFO request
CaboJohn - 8-28-2004 at 07:30 AM
JZ
Thanks for the great report. I was planning to be at the August show but my schedule changed at the last minute.
Any chance you have contact info you can share find for the manufacturer you found at EnArt who had one of the biggest and best retail shops in
Tlaquepaque?
I plan on going to the February show.
Thanks in advance.
Check your U2U
JZ - 8-28-2004 at 09:26 AM