Meeting time...

On my first day of meetings, I made sure to dress like a professional young woman - I even wore my hair in a bun. I was nervous that (because of my age) I wouldn't be taken seriously in my series of meetings. I arrived very nervous, and about 10 minutes early. This meeting was in a custom tailoring shop for women, in a large building with many other stores. The lady I was supposed to meet with was not there, and I was soon informed that she would not be there until 11 am. Feeling slightly discouraged, we left to kill some time until the meeting. We went back to the tailor shop on time. However, when we arrived, the woman was there but said she was "not feeling well." She kept repeating herself, saying that she felt very sick - with face in hands.
This was a little uncomfortable because I didn't really know what I could say or do to make things better. She finally asked me what I was interested in doing and I told her... I was starting a women's clothing line and needed to find manufacturers who specialize in silks.
She got on the phone, & within minutes started calling people she knew who did this. After about 15 minutes of listening to her ramble in Thai, she passed the phone to me.
I said, "hello" and got an identical response of: "hello?" from a man on the line...
This continued back and forth several times until I asked if they were manufacturers, and if so, could I meet with them.
I was confused because when the woman passed me her phone she didn't explain who was on it. We set up a meeting with our new contact the very same day. My sister Lyle's driver took us to the next meeting because it was further outside of Bangkok and we did not want to get lost.
We arrived on time and waited about an hour and a half in a small room full of beautiful silk coats.
My Mom, sister Lyle, began to get a bit nervous because we were in there for so long... but sure enough the owners arrived.
We established what we wanted to do and I explained some of my designs, in order to have samples made. After hours and hours of discussing everything, I left my second meeting. I waited about a week and I had another meeting to see the first samples and discuss other orders of business. My brother-law, Pete came with me to this meeting because not only is he a well established "business man," but he speaks Thai. His Thai was essential to my business meeting because he could figure out if we were on the same page and how we were going to proceed. My first set of samples were pretty much perfect, and I was so excited to see my ideas come to real life... without sewing them myself for once.

It was official, I found the people that I would be working with. After several meetings (about 4 to 6 hours each), we went over every detail - inch by inch - of each design for my Holiday and Spring collection!