I have a weakness for European light fixtures. OK, I actually may have to enter an Italian light fixture 12 step program. I've got it bad. Fortunately we have some great fixtures already and we are bringing them from our current house. We have been working with Jeff Brown at Colorlume on our lighting. Jeff is great and is fortunately much more focused on photometrics and low voltage transformers and is fine with me searching out the cool decorative pendants and sconces.
Recently I was looking for a replacement exterior sconce because the original unit Jeff specified came in too spendy. He suggested I talk to Teresa Teachey Associates, a lighting rep firm. She represents more than 28 manufacturers--many of whom I had never heard of. That's like crack to an addict. I spent the better part of the day checking out all of the websites, found an outdoor sconce (at right by Access Lighting) , AND discovered the Flaver corporation. Flaver is an Italian company just entering the US market and Teresa is one of the first US reps (In Fuquay Varina-go figure).
One of the many genetic gifts I inherited from my mother is the ability to select the single most expensive item in any product line regardless of my familiarity with what I am looking at. I can't tell you the number of light fixtures I have fallen in love with that turned out to cost more than a two week vacation in Italy. So I had prepared myself for the inevitable emotional body blow of learning the price of my latest love the Flaver LOOP glass pendant. I tentatively called Teresa to ask and she told me that Flaver was pricing their products very aggressively to get a foothold in the US market and that she was further heavily discounting to get some initial pieces in the field. I almost fell over when she told me it would be $295. I was expecting 10 times that. I signed up immediately.
Flaver has no US presence so I would have to buy the fixture directly from Italy. I was told I would get a ProForma invoice for the $295 plus shipping. This came from their export manager--let's call her Gia to protect her innocence. Teresa called me flabbergasted that the shipping quote was $700! and that was for pick up at the Charlotte airport. This is a box that is 27"x27"x7". I immediately thought that we simply had a language problem and I sent Gia an email explaining that I didn't need it overnight and that actually surface freight would be fine as I didn't need it for months. It actually seemed to be lost on Gia that they were not going to be successful selling into the US market when their shipping costs were three times the cost of the product. The response was simply that that was the best they could do on shipping. They do not ship glass via the post office and if I could do better they told me to contact my own shipper. It retrospect I should have thrown in the towel then but I was hyped up about being the first kid on the block with a Flaver Loop fixture. I contacted FEDEX and got a quote of $550--they said it had a large dimensional weight. Undaunted, I called my friend Dan you is a manufacturer's rep for Italian products and he offered to include it in his next container if I couldn't find a resolution. He also said that it should be about 60 Euros (about 90$) to send it. After a week or so back and forth I decided to take another approach. I asked Gia what it would cost to ship the fixture to someone in the European Union. She said 40 Euros and I smiled that smile of someone who has beaten the system. I have friends in Switzerland and a brother who lives in Holland so I called to see who might be coming to the US soon. My brother offered to hand carry it as luggage the next time he came and I thought I had my solution.
With the shipping resolved I called Gia to give her my credit card. I was told that Flaver does not accept credit cards. They would only accept an international wire transfer. In my country.......... The fact that there are approximately 2 billion international credit card transactions every day did not seem to matter. Feeling the forces of nature again beginning to converge against me I reconsidered bailing on the whole thing but decided to investigate the wire transfer thing. My local bank couldn't do it so I called Charles Schwab and they said no problem and emailed me the form I needed. Thus ensued about two weeks of hilarious miscues and language issues around finding out their SWIFT code and street address of their parent bank and the correct number of digits for their account code. I realized I had crossed the threshold of this being about the object of my quest and was about the quest itself. It was ludicrous that I was expending this much effort to get a $295 light fixture that should have been a 10 minute transaction. So I paid my $29 wire transfer fee and my money went off into the ether and 4 days later Gia emails to say that she has received my payment and will ship the fixture to my brother the following day. Yea!
Then came the arcane questions--did my brother live in the center of town or the suburbs (apparently it determines the kind of truck that does the delivery), what were his opening and closing hours? Who did he work for? Emergency contact numbers. I don't think of the Italians as a beurocratic bunch but I began to think that Gia was simply jerking my chain at this point. Finally I satisfied all the questions and supposedly we were good to go.
Three days after the fixture was supposed to ship I get an email from Gia saying they couldn't ship the fixture until they get my brother's VAT number (Value added Tax). No exceptions. I'm sure I have lost my money and there is no way I will ever see the LOOP. I gently explain to Gia that my brother is a private US citizen, not a company, and he does not have a VAT number. Sorry--no exceptions.
My wife Ellen had the brilliant idea to call our friend Andrea who lives with his wife Allessandra and two daughters Antea and Anjeri in the Italian part of Switzerland (and of course speaks fluent Italian). Andrea lived with me when he was doing an international law degree at Duke a few years ago. He is now a public prosecutor in Ticino.
I called Andrea, embarrased with the extent of my folly on such a trivial prusuit, but he told me he would call Gia and get to the bottom of things. He said she was very gracious and that the issue was similar to the wholesale/retail situation in the US. If a manufacturer ships a product to a reseller they don't charge tax as the retailer will eventually charge the end user the tax. When she was going to ship the fixture to the US this was not an issue as the European VAT (21%!) does not apply to shipments outside of the EU. But now that she was shipping a product to a US customer but in the EU she couldn't ship it without a tax exemption number. Andrea told her that I would gladly pay the tax but that, of course, would require another international wire transfer. I was able to laugh about this and Andrea was able to convince her to ship the fixture on my promise to pay the tax unless my brother could get it reimbursed when he passed through customs.
My brother emailed me last week to tell me the fixture had arrived and was well packed but that he was not coming to the US as planned. He is on the lookout for someone coming to the US and he will send it with them and then have them ship it to me from somewhere in the US. I'm giving myself about 50% odds of actually ever seeing this fixture in one piece but if it ever finds its home into our library I am really going to appreciate that light.................................. Stay tuned for updates.
Cost of light fixture $295
VAT tax $58
17 hours of my time to get the light fixture to my doorstep: Priceless
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