Thank you for your interest in ANTZ Imports and welcome to our website!

ANTZ Imports is based out of Portland, Oregon, USA and has been in business since late 2004. Our primary goal is to bring unique and useful, handmade products to retailers globally, while simultaneously helping artisans in Central/South America grow their businesses and improve their livelihood. We strive to keep our overhead and prices low, so that you can afford to buy more of our products, which ultimately leads to these skilled, but disadvantaged handicrafters making a fair living. At this time, the artisans we primarily source from are located in Guatemala and Peru.

People ask us how we find our products. It's a great question and we enjoy answering it. We spent one year reading books, scanning the internet, and talking to various contacts both in and outside of the U.S. to get a sense of where the pockets of handicraft skills were located. Our scope was Spanish-speaking countries in the Western hemisphere, since these countries' products are under-represented in the USA (relative to Asian countries). Then we went "treasure-hunting" in five countries, including to many remote and impoverished villages. Long story short, we still work with many of those original artisans, and now we do much of the design work ourselves. We visit our artisans at least once per year, and we speak to them via telephone sometimes daily!

This year, we are excited to introduce many new products, new designs, a new brand ("Clothesline Knits"), and our new & improved website! In the past, we have done very little selling directly to consumers. But then we realized that, as hard as we try, not every town/city is blessed with a store that carries all of our products. So...we now sell our products from our web store on a retail basis as well as on a wholesale basis. If you're a consumer visting our site, we encourage you to purchase in person from any of the stores listed on our "Retail Locations" page. In fairness to these stores, we will not consciously undercut them on price from our website.

That said, we love to hear from our customers, including your ideas for improvement. Feel free to contact us any time.

Have a fabulous day!

Angela, Tony, and the Team