The Haitian Woodcarvings Story

1970

A True Story

My venture into importing Haitian woodcarvings

Written in 2010* 1,150 Words*

By Howard Yasgar

The story I am about to tell you is all about my experience dealing in Haitian woodcarvings.

In Hait, you can find hand carved wooden items for sale everywhere you go.

Wood carving is probably the best-selling tourist items that the country has to offer.

The carving of various items out of wood is an old industry in Haiti, they have been doing it for so

long that they have already cut down most of the trees, which now causes severe land erosion.

In the capital city of Port Au Prince there are several large stores that specialize in buying from the local craftsmen, and then they resell the items to the smaller stores, and wholesale buyers coming to Haiti from other islands.

From what I could see, there doesn’t appear to be any government control over the woodcarving industry, so buying any wooden items in Haiti is strictly a buyer beware situation.

First, the items are all dark colored and made to look like mahogany, but they are carved out of any kind of wood that the carver can put his hands on.

Secondly, most of the wood they use, have tropical boring beetles inside, but the beetle holes are disguised by plugging them with dark shoe polish, I learned about that problem the hard way.

Because I was traveling to Haiti so often on business, I was always curious to see the endless variety of carved wooden items being made by local Haitian craftsmen.

Whenever I passed by a store selling wood carvings, I would stop by, talk to the owners and look at any new items they had.

There were many traditional items that have always been carved in Haiti, they ranged from all sizes of African style statues to candy dishes, turtle carvings, ashtrays and voodoo masks.

While most items they carved have a tropical Haitian look to them, some things like salad bowls had more of a contemporary look.

Because Haiti is a small country, most of wood carving store owners knew who I was, and they all offered to sell me wood carvings at wholesale prices if I ever wanted to import the stuff to Miami.

So, one day, on my return trip to Miami, I brought home a few hand carved candy dishes to show my partner.

I told him how cheap the items were in Haiti, I had paid only 20 cents for each piece, and I asked him if he thought we could sell the woodcarvings in Miami?

My partner wasn’t terribly impressed, but he didn’t say no, so I took that as being a yes.

On my next trip to Haiti, I visited the three largest woodwork stores and I bought something from all of them.

I spent a total of $385.00, a considerable sum in 1970.

By evening, my taxi driver Tony said that everyone in Port Au Prince knew what I had bought.

The shipment arrived in Miami on an Air Haiti flight, it was all crazily wrapped up with sisal cordage, the bundle looked like it had come from Africa.

The shipment was way too big for me to lift, so all the Air Haiti employees helped me unpack the items and load them in my Astro van.

Everyone just loved he stuff, so I gave them all a pair of small hand carved voodoo masks.

In my warehouse, we had already set up metal shelving in anticipation of the shipment arriving.

We made tall stacks of similar items on each shelf.

My partner once worked for the Winn-Dixie grocery store chain, and he still had contacts there.

So, he contacted them.

They just loved our little wooden carved Haitian statues and they said we could put them in several stores on a consignment basis; they would pay us as they sold them.

They said that they would happily pay us .75 cents each, as they were selling them for $1.75.

To me it sounded too good to be true, I had paid .20 cents each in Haiti and here we were selling them for .75 cents, now that’s making money.

Back at our warehouse, several people came in and they all liked the larger salad bowls, but I only had 2 or 3 sets so we were quickly sold out.

In the meantime, I spotted some saw dust on our shelving.

It appears the wood boring beetles had eaten their way through all the stacks of candy dishes and ashtrays.

I looked everything over and I could see that most of the bigger wood statues also had boring beetles eating them.

I called Truly Nolan the local exterminators and they said they would gas all the woodwork for $100.00, so I threw away all the small, damaged items and brought everything else to them to gas.

A week later we found that the poison gas hadn’t worked.

I was advised that I needed to freeze all the items, it was the only way to kill boring beetles.

Every week my partner and I were making the rounds of the Winn Dixie stores replacing the little

statues that were sold.

After several weeks my partner started calculating how much profit we were making by selling to the Winn-Dixie stores.

After considering all our time and gasoline spent calling on the stores, he estimated that we had lost about $200.00 doing business with Winn-Dixie.

So, we decided to give Winn Dixie all the small statues that were remaining in their stores for free, and we stopped calling on them.

Back at our warehouse I was approached by a fellow who said he was a pilot for the Kroger Drug store chain, he saw a small Haitian bowl we had and he said he wanted to buy it for his wife, so I gave it to him for free.

After reviewing the situation, it appeared the only item that sold quickly and everyone liked was the salad bowl sets, so I decided on my next trip to Haiti I would investigate buying more of them.

Once I was in Hatai, I went to all the woodcarving stores, but they only had one or two salad bowl sets in stock that I could buy.

My cab driver Tony Richmond said he knew the man who made them and would take me there.

The old man making the salad bowls offered them to me for $7.00 a set, that was $1.00 cheaper than the stores in Port Au Prince, but he only produced one set a week.

When I returned to Miami, the Kroger pilot that I gave the free bowl to was there.

I thought he was going to complain about something regarding the bowl, but all he said was that the buyers at Kroger headquarters liked the bowl and they wanted to talk to me.

The next day a young woman from Kroger’s purchasing called me, and she said, “We loved your Haitian bowl, and we would like to order 6000 of them, but we need fast delivery so we can run a Christmas special.

I told her that Haiti couldn’t produce 6000 bowls in 100 years, and if they did try, there wouldn’t be any trees left in the entire country.

As I spoke to her, I could hear the garbage truck, outside, it was picking up the last of all our remaining Haitian wood carvings and taking it all to the dump.