Interspecies Trader

Chapter 279 – Sponsor

Over the next week, I spent most of my free time helping with the store preparations. While I wasn’t focusing much on the inside, my role was mostly to stock up goods, especially for the second floor, as well as promotion. We created a few flyers to post on the general boards around the city, but we couldn’t do that for distribution. Paper was expensive and created in low quantities. It wasn’t something that could be thrown away mindlessly.Instead, word of mouth was the best alternative. A new shop opening always attracted a certain amount of attention, in particular from those living close by. We would often get random folks asking about what the store would sell, which were great starting points for rumors. Another advantage was that there hadn’t been any selnic item sale for almost a year. At most, there would be some people reselling them for high prices or at auctions, and the fact that a new steady supply of the products would arrive in town interested the wealthy inhabitants around.

When everything was almost ready, I didn’t forget to take some precautions. No matter what, the scale would be completely unlike selling a few devices in the night market. Greed and curiosity were bound to occur, and I had an easy fix for this.

On each side of the main entrance, we attached two panel boards. The first one was something of a modern concept that people didn’t do in the outer world. It was a summary of what we would sell and on which floor. First floor, food. Second floor, raw materials. Third floor, selnic items. I left some room to add more or change something later, like the possibility of selling books on the second floor and so on.

The other panel was the main point. I had spent a lot of time trying to find the best formulation. The final text was this.

[This store has received full approval from Geola’s city hall and is being sponsored by Lady Angin Vejas.]

This was the perfect pest deterrent. No one in this region of the world had the guts to provoke or defy the city’s ruler. On top of that, it could also reassure buyers, which was a nice bonus.

Of course, this wasn’t exactly the truth, but it wasn’t a lie either. I believed that Angin herself wouldn’t mind since she was quite lenient with me. On the other hand, it would annoy Crali if she were to find out about it, which wasn’t a big deal. If she came to confront me about it, I was confident in talking my way out of trouble.

If someone went to the city hall and inquired about it? Well, they wouldn’t be able to deny it either. It was indeed true that the store was a gift from Angin and the city hall. They wanted to hide my specific involvement in helping with the outbreak, but the fact that I received something in exchange for my services didn’t need to be hidden.

On another note, I met with the employees and partners handling production and sales in dome 2. I haven’t had that many interactions with that side so far, but with the factory making its debut, I needed to at least be present for the event.

I met with the factory manager, with the employees themselves, and also the person who would be responsible for selling our products. For now, she would go around different selnic shops to pitch our products and see if any were interested in selling them. If some were interested, we would sign a provider/retail contract and go forward with increased production.

The factory itself was divided into two parts. One was for material transformation. It handled transforming raw materials or recycling used ones into pieces needed to build the items. We had to buy expensive machinery and hire costly experts for that. Even then, they couldn’t create everything. We were buying a lot of parts from external providers, especially the most complex ones. The other side of the factory was the assembly line. They used the many pieces to assemble the final products and verify they worked as expected.

For now, the scale would be relatively small. We wanted to get a feeling for the market and check how popular the products would be, both in the domes and outside. The manufacturing line was already constructed with scaling in mind, meaning we could increase production when we needed to, relatively easily.

I stayed there for the day, witnessing the first few products being built. I had visited a factory back in my world during my internship. Here, things were a lot more manual compared to the high-tech I had come across at that time. There were fewer machines and robots, and more people handling each specific assembly task. Still, the line was well-thought-out, and by the end of the day, we already had some products ready to be shipped.

Finally, the store was ready for its grand opening. The following day, I left home early to prepare for everything. I had asked the bunnies to prepare a bit more food than usual for the first floor, at least for the first day. After that, I took the items freshly out of the factory to display on the third floor.

We opened at 9 in the morning. There were already quite a few people waiting to get in, mostly those curious about the novelty. To celebrate our first day, everything was sold at a 10% discount for one day. Folks entered the shop with a smile, looking at everything that was displayed, but with an unclear intention of buying anything.

That was fine. We had some serious customers, too. Those looked either like fellow traders or wealthy individuals. They glanced rapidly at the products on the first and second floors, their objective being the third one.

This was where I was stationed. I had chosen to help a little at the start, to show the ropes to the new clerk, to monitor the situation, but also to enjoy myself. After the smaller shops in Makji, this was my first large one in this world, with the clear intention of becoming my main income source. There was no way I would leave it to my employees without appreciating the feeling of selling my self-developed and self-manufactured products at least a little.

The merchants were the fastest, coming in groups of two or three, and exchanging opinions in between them.

“So these are the famous 'selnic' items.”

“They look different from the ones I saw at an auction.”

“Is that so? In what term?”

“This is a style of design I’ve never seen before. I don’t know how they made this. These are sleek, with curves instead of angles, and feel like a lot of effort went into them. It’s completely unlike what blacksmiths produce in Bankil.”

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