Trade fairs and sourcing trips.

What a fair is genuinely good for.

Putting your hands on the product. For furniture, homeware, craft and food, a photograph flatters and a fair does not. Three days of touching things teaches a buyer more about a category than months of correspondence.

Comparing at speed. Twenty producers of the same thing in one hall, in one afternoon, is a calibration exercise you cannot replicate any other way.

Meeting the person rather than the address. A fifteen-minute conversation establishes whether somebody understands their own product, and that is a filter worth having early.

What it does not do.

It does not tell you who makes anything. A stand is a marketing budget, and traders exhibit alongside producers with the same photographs on the wall. The friendliest company at a fair is not automatically a factory.

It does not establish capacity, legality or whether they have shipped to your market. All of that is a register check and a visit, and both happen after the fair.

It does not produce prices you can rely on. Fair prices are conversation openers, given without a specification, and they routinely change once somebody actually quotes.

How to use the week properly.

The fair is two or three days of the trip and the trip is a week. Spending the remaining days visiting the shortlist at their own premises is what converts a fair from an interesting experience into a sourcing decision.

1. 01

   Before: write the specification

   Walking a hall without one produces a folder of business cards and no comparison. With one, every conversation has the same question in it.

2. 02

   At the fair: collect and photograph

   Company name, what they claim to make, and a photograph of the actual product with something for scale. Cards without context are worthless a week later.

3. 03

   At the fair: ask the market question

   How do they handle a specific requirement of your destination. Producers who ship there answer immediately and boringly.

4. 04

   Same evening: check the register

   Business identification number and what the company is licensed to do. It takes minutes and it removes half the folder before you spend a day on anybody.

5. 05

   The remaining days: visit

   Three or four premises in a cluster. This is the part that decides, and it is the part most visitors skip because the fair was tiring.

Questions buyers ask.

Read next.

• Finding a producer in Indonesia

  Six routes to real producers, what each is good for and blind to, and the five-step funnel from a list of names to a first order.

• What to look at on a factory visit

  A day at a producer answers questions no document can. What to look for and the three things that tell you most.

• How to verify an Indonesian supplier

  Two public government registries, the cross-check between them that catches most problems before a deposit moves, and the part only a visit can answer.

• Writing a specification suppliers can price

  The document that decides what arrives. What belongs in it, what has to be measurable, and the words that cause disputes.

• PT, CV and what the letters mean

  The letters in front of a supplier's name carry real information about liability, capital and ownership.

• Reading a supplier's website

  Ten minutes on a supplier's site answers questions before you ask them. Signal, noise and warnings.

• Using a B2B platform without getting burned

  A directory produces candidates and cannot verify them. What the badges audit, and the checks to run yourself.

• Planning a sourcing trip

  The country is enormous and production is scattered. How to plan a trip worth the flights.