Agni means fire.
Exim is the boring half.

The part nobody sees is the part you pay for

Buying is the easy half, and it is the half everybody photographs. Tea is bought on the ridge in Ilam. Churpi comes out of the hill dairies in Kavre and Ramechhap. Bowls are picked up at the workshop door in Patan, pashmina off a Kathmandu handloom, cardamom straight off the dryers in Taplejung.

What a buyer abroad actually pays an export house for is everything after that. Grading against an agreed sample. Moisture readings on anything dried, because moisture drives both keeping quality and how much of what you bought is actually product. Packing that survives six weeks at sea and a border crossing. The phytosanitary certificate, the certificate of origin, the residue analysis, the ISPM 15 stamp. And somebody who picks up the phone when a container is sitting at Birgunj.

Twelve lines, not forty

We carry twelve categories and about sixty products. That is a deliberate ceiling. An exporter who lists everything is an exporter who has bought most of it off a wholesale floor in Kathmandu and does not know where any of it came from.

Every line here has a district attached to it and a person we buy from in that district. When we cannot buy at source — which happens, particularly in agricultural lines during a short season — we will tell you so if you ask.

What we will not do

Three things, and they cost us orders.

We will not mislabel a fibre or a grade. A 70/30 pashmina–silk stole is described as 70/30. A machine-spun bowl is never described as hand-beaten. A blend is never sold as a garden-level lot. Where we cannot verify a supplier's claim ourselves, we do not list the product.

We will not falsify a declaration. Not the value, not the description, not the country of origin. Under-declaring is fraud and it puts the buyer at more risk than it puts us at.

We will not promise a lead time we cannot hold. Handwork takes weeks. Harvests happen when they happen. Dashain and Tihar close a great deal of the country for two to three weeks each autumn. You get the real number.

Retail and wholesale, out of the same warehouse

Most exporters pick one. We do both, because they feed each other: the retail catalogue is how a wholesale buyer discovers a line exists, and the wholesale volume is what makes it worth carrying sixty products for retail.

So you can buy one singing bowl or a container of them. The goods, the grading and the packing are the same either way. The transaction is completely different — retail goes through the cart, wholesale goes through a quotation.

Where we are

30 N Gould St Ste R, Sheridan, Wyoming 82801, USA. Sunday to Friday, nine to six, Nepal time — which is UTC+5:45, an offset that exists mostly to confuse scheduling software.

Come and see the warehouse if you are in Kathmandu. Buyers who visit tend to order differently afterwards, usually because they have handled the difference between a raised bowl and a spun one.