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colored straw items in Italy, so I thought why not dye the straw here. " - He came back a month later with some samples of straw, carefully dyed to match the magazine scraps - "I said, all right what are you going to do with the straw? How about making some placemats? Again I thought I would just get rid of the guy, but he came back 2 months later with placements. I felt sorry for him, so I bought a few dozen, but they didn't move too well. He came back + asked if I wanted to buy some more placemats + I said, no, how about trying some boxes + hats. Well 4 months later he came back with the most beautiful straw hats + boxes you ever saw + these are the things which eventually sold. By this time almost a year had passed + the guy had women in 3 or 4 villages working for him, all having fun playing around with new designs for hats and boxes. These are the boxes which you now see at Asmoro's (Asmoro Damai)
 
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and everywhere."
Sari Boutique took nothing on consignment, but bought everything outright, adding a flat 30% markup to everything. although Sergio worked through intermediaries + has a positive attitude about the role of intermediaries, he carefully avoided having anything to do with government officials or their wives who were trying to horn in - mentioned a Minister's wife who wanted to set up a handcraft center, and the head of the district in Sulawesi where the silk industry is located who tried to force Sergio to do all his silk buying through him - Sergio refers to the Ibu - Ibu's[[?]] as "gorgons who would take all the profits for themselves, and of course that would do nothing for the producers, would it?"
tells the following story about his silk trading: "Originally we bought our Sulawesi silk from a certain Princess _x__ from that area. Later I found out