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industry on Sulawesi - he flew over anyway, at his own expense, got in touch with a Belgian archeologist on the coast who took him up to see a hand-loom silk industry which employed then 250,000 women
at the end of the 3 months he set up Sari Boutique (1st Western-oriented outlet in Indonesia for Indonesian fashion handcrafts)
at the time he had 4 assistants, including Ajie Damai & Abdul Hatiel
Abdul Hatiel, who is now manager at Sari Jaya (the old Sari Boutique no [[strikethrough]]n[[/strikethrough]] longer exists), was then more or less in charge of bookkeeping & keeping tab of expenses; say Sergio, "He was the one who would come in  and say 'Sergio, those silk shirts you ordered may be beautiful but we've got a storeroom full of them and they're not moving." Says Sergio, "Of course we needed a man like that around."

Sergio cals himself a "product design consultant" and is apparently

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quite conversant with the technical aspects of crafts, especially ceramics; While he was head of Sarie Boutique he tried to run it "as a business" but he says "our function there was to help people" - for this reason, no matter how busy he and his staff were, they always took the time out to talk to small sellers who came around with a suitcase full of wares

originally Sergio went out to villages and made direct purchases, but later word got around in village areas that Sari Boutique would buy handcrafts and apparently a lot of their purchases were made through intermediaries who came into the store 

tells the following about a Mr.Timbun (?) from Tasikmaloya who came around with some plain basketry - Sergio said they might be interested if they dyed the 'shaw' ("I said that just to get of him") - the man asked what colors and Sergio tore some scraps out of colored magazine pages and gave them to him "We make