Longtime fair trade store to reopen after closure last summer. See where
After closing its location in Land Park, a longtime Sacramento art gallery is reopening Friday in Florin.
Zanzibar Fair Trade is set to open its new showroom and warehouse at 5450 Power Inn Road. Zanzibar, before its closure last July, operated in Sacramento for 26 years, said Scott Farrell, the owner of the gallery.
“We, like a phoenix, have risen again!” the business said on social media. “While not as diverse as once were, we do import from 14 countries currently and have plans on expanding!”
Farrell said Zanzibar’s previous closure was due to changes in the retail market — primarily the increased popularity online purchases.
The new Zanzibar Fair Trade, will still offer retail sales, but will no longer have a full retail store. Instead, it will focus on wholesale to other retailers.
“People literally are just buying everything online, so we saw the writing on the wall,” Farrell said. “We used to do a lot of whole-selling to other businesses. So we started off trying to pivot towards that direction.”
The store will still offer sales to the public from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays for walk-in shopping. To purchase art on Sundays or during the week, an appointment will be required, Farrell said.
For Farrell, who has been the gallery’s owner since its creation in 1999, the reopening is heartwarming. He said the store’s current focus is to reunite with its past clients.
“I missed the store tremendously, and the main thing is getting to reconnect with our clients,” Farrell said. “We have absolutely amazing clients, and they miss the store as much as I did.”
The revival of the art gallery will include weekly online sales, the gallery’s owners wrote. A live sale will be hosted on Zanibar’s Facebook page on Saturdays from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Zanzibar’s reopening will include hundreds of Soapstone animal cravings, “one-of-a-kind” baskets, ethnic jewelry and Bolga Market Baskets, the shop said on social media. This installment of Zanzibar Fair Trade has scaled back on its partnered artisans as well, Farrell said. Currently, the reopened store is working with 450 artists, rather than the 4,800 it partnered with in the past.
“We don’t have the diversity that we had, but of the items that we are carrying, we amplified that tremendously,” Farrell said.
