During the African summit conference held here this week, souvenir and traditional clothes shops were, perhaps, experiencing a boom. However, for souvenir shops situated on Churchill Avenue, the reverse was true.
The handcrafted souvenir and traditional ornaments galleries at that specific location seemed to be on its cold marketing moment when The Reporter visited the place on Wednesday. The place that at least presents over 30 shops decorated with traditional scarves and dresses hang on the small veranda and the particular decorative objects made by hand made the place pleasing to the eye.
The different colors of the scarves and the dresses together with the different handcrafted objects and their odor, imparted the place with a unique character. The place is quite attractive and even pushes one to make some shopping or conduct a window-shopping.
The four-year-old Alem Souvenir is a shop that provides different handicraft objects, hand-woven scarves, traditional T-shirts, woolen carpets, jewelries and other cultural items. The shop does not have any regular customer. However, tourists and local people are part of the marketing, according to the 21-year-old Sedik Yimer, a salesperson.
“When African summits are held in the city, it sounds as if we are going to have good sales better than any other regular days. However, that is not necessarily true,” the young salesperson said.
Despite the fact that an annual summit like the one of the African Union gathers around five thousand participants who usually do not contribute much to the sales of these shops while summits like ICASA, the International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa, which assembled more than 5,000 participants from around the globe was kind of a spark for the booming of the markets of the shops.
Sedik says that the 16th ICASA meeting that was held in the metropolis a couple of months ago literally brought fortune to the souvenir shop. However, the types of customers of the shops are usually tourists. Most of the time, they are interested in handmade jewelries and hand-woven clothes.
Formerly, there used to be not much of these types of shops in the city center. And these shops used to be the best place to provide different types of traditional items for sale and they still are. However, places like Shiro Meda, Shola, Megenagna, and other places are becoming popular with the sales of the same items and this gives a vibe to the market for Letay Mehari, owner of a souvenir and traditional clothes selling shop. The lady, who is in her early 40’s, transformed her personal living quarters to a souvenir and traditional clothes selling shop just four years ago.
The shop provides traditional bags, traditional clothes, handmade jewelries, handcrafted objects, works in clay and different items. The odor of the handmade objects gives the shop a different scent.
No one came to Letay’s shop during the 18th summit of the African Union held at the new headquarters of the organization. However, during the huge ICASA meeting, Letay was able to count her blessings.
Nevertheless, it was quite simple to observe that these shops do not have regular customers and are not meant to have a booming market as a result of different summits, according to Letay.
Tourists and locals are also customers of Letay’s shop. The lady cannot differentiate which type of item is more saleable as everything that shops like her provide is equally important to the customers.
Hamer Gallery is one of the old shops in the neighborhood. The shop provides handmade traditional shoes, traditional clothes, and traditional bags, and handmade jewelries, paintings on parchment, handicraft objects and traditional T-shirts are all over the shop. The 21-year-old Aynalem Fissiha did not see anyone walking in to the shop during different summits.
“Tourists usually walk into the shop and the biggest thing that they all do is cutting the price unfairly. If you have a fixed price tag on a specific T-shirt for 120 birr they keep on bargaining to buy it for only 80 birr or 50 birr,” says the young lady. People from different summits do also have the same trend and they think everything that has traditional touch has to be sold at low prices.
The entire souvenir shops that The Reporter interviewed agreed with the idea that annual summits do not bring any kind of exaggerated market difference. However, a unique summit that holds up a lot of attendants gives it a glimpse of a booming market.
