Buying Trip

A couple weeks ago I left my normal life of being a wife, mom, babysitter, cake decorator,etc. and drove to Atlanta on a buying trip for the Lloyd Co. Our decorator, Melody, went with me since she is the creative brains behind everything that looks amazing at the store. We spent a day and a half at AmericasMart shopping for merchandise to fill the store, primarily for fall and Christmas of this year. It's hard to explain exactly what it's like so I tried to take a few pictures, but they definitely don't do it justice and I never thought about it at the right time to get the best shots. Oh well, it's a start!

The entire market is made up of four buildings, each with up to 20 floors. They are organized by type of merchandise so we stayed in the same general area most of the time. Most of our vendors were located on floors 16-20 of buildings one and two. Even though that sounds like everything's close we still managed to do quite a bit of walking! This is a view from when I got off the escalator on one of our floors. I always describe it as being similar to a mall and each of the different stores is a different vendor.

The difficult thing is that there are many different stores with similar or identical merchandise so we have to shop smart and compare prices, minimums, quantities, etc. It gets very confusing very quickly! These pictures are of some of the items we bought. Sullivan's is one of our favorite vendors. They are very nice people who have been selling to us since Grandma Jane started the gift shop at the store. They always ask about Mrs. Lloyd and genuinely miss seeing her in the showroom. The theme we chose for our main Christmas tree is inspired by the picture below. It's hard to tell much in the picture, but we will be decorating with mercury glass ornaments, ivory, silver and gold. Based on the items we bought I think it will be very pretty!

This is another showroom that we shop in often. We had to have appointments with all of our sales reps and even then sometimes had to wait for them to assist us. There were lots of buyers out there so hopefully that means good things for the economy!