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Our Mission

"Supplying The World's Most Colorful, Economical and Culturally Diverse Gifts and Accessories"


We at Adventure Imports strive to provide you the customer with the highest quality manufactured products at an economical price such that you can earn the maximum profit. Coupled with our commitment to meeting your target price, we also place a great importance on our workforce located both locally in the United States and overseas where much of our production occurs.


We do not use machiliadoras or sweatshops and we try to use materials and components that hurt the environment the least such as recylced paper stock, natural dyes and fabrics made of natural fibers.


For our overseas production, we attempt to employ home-based labor where possible to help preserve cultures that are in danger of assimilation into our quickly consumer-driven world. Examples of our commitment to support evaporating cultures is our use of native Mayan Indians as fabricators of many of our gifts and accessories.


While much of our production has been mechanized, much of the work is done by hand, often in the homes of the workers high in the mountain town where they live. Many of these people live a day's walk or more from the nearest road and they carry the small accessories they fabricate for us on their backs to our warehouse. For production of our hackey sacks, a small kicking ball popular with kids, we employ over a hundred weavers scattered in towns in the Mountains of Quiche, a providence in Guatemala.


Likewise, our batik fabrics are produced by hand in small towns in Indonesia using ancient dying processes. By employing natives that still use ancient techniques, we are helping to preserve a way of life that is culturally diverse and unique. Check out our Travel Pictures to view some of the rituals that are still practiced to this day by the workers that we employ.


Much of the income that our third world workers derive from working for us is suplemental income that complements their subsistence farming livlihood. This money is used to purchase staples like food, clothing, medicine and important accoutrements like radios. We will continue to search out new sources of production that employ native peoples and cultures.



Making A Difference

We at Adventure Imports feel that it is important to support people in the world. For this reason we have structured our business so that we help others when doing business. From the retailer to our suppliers we try to understand what is needed to make our interaction a beneficial one, and to the world in general.


For this reason we have chosen many unconventional methods of doing business. This has often been difficult since we supply a huge variety and quantity of customers and retail outlets all over the world.


Our primary support is of indigenous cultures and their products. We believe that it is vitally important to retain the unique peoples, their arts and their culture. Supporting these vanishing peoples through the purchase of their products in the way we have chosen to help.


Adventure Imports is the mass market source for the ethnic merchandise. Often we have to have our own products manufactured to cater to the often finicky North American Market, but we will employ components of indigenous culture wherever possible.


As often as possible, we employ home based production or cooperatives that employ at risk workers when sourcing and making our products. We attempt to work directly with the people who produce our goods, so that they earn a fair market wage. Many of our work force in different parts of the world make our products as a secondary income in additional to traditional agriculture or raising a family. We use alternative fabrics or those that have less impact on the environment. For instance, Hemp fabric contributes to a society less impacted by toxic pesticides since hemp does not need pesticides to grow. Also the deep roots of the hemp plant avoid topsoil erosion, an added benefit.


Adventure Imports donates a portion of our proceeds to help the indigenous peoples. In 2003, we donated and arranged for a truckload of sports balls to Afghanistan made by our Pakistani workers. We also support several relief endeavors in Guatemala, a country where we make many of our products. This country is struggling under the legacy of a 30 year civil that has left thousands of children without parents.


A worthy recipient of Adventure Imports donation is Escuela de la Calle, a Guatemalan indigenous organization dedicated to improving the lives of street children and children at risk of living on the streets in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, where some of our products are manufactured. Escuela de la Calle feeds, houses and teaches numerous street children, most victims of the civil war.


Find out more about this organization


Another worthy recipient of our assistance is the group Water Partners International, who has built and continues to build potable water systems for villages in the countryside of Guatemala and other parts of the developing world. A need as basic as clean, healthy water is something most take for granted, but is lacking for nearly a sixth of the world's population.


Yet another group that we support and worthy of your attention is PAVA, a private organization that works closely with villages in the highlands of Guatemala to achieve long-term sustainable development through community projects and community education. A full-time staff in Guatemala manages PAVA's programs, providing technical expertise and planning for drinking water, school construction, reforestation projects, and women's community education programs.


PAVA is staffed and run by Guatemalans. PAVA receives project proposals from various rural communities in need of aid. With representatives from the communities, PAVA plans, designs and helps fund the proposed projects. Using this community initated approach, PAVA has met with much success following this formula. PAVA is an official 501c3 non-profit organization. Donations to PAVA directly go to benefit Guatemalan projects.


PAVA count be found on the web at: www.pavafoundation.org


We partake in other efforts to help individuals that we meet in our business and travels, and we have been blessed with opportunities to help at the local level, which we feel is the most important of all. We also have first hand knowledge that the money we pay for the merchandise that we sell, and the money that we donate to the relief organizations, is helping to bridge the financial gap between our developing country producers, and the North American consumers of our products.


We encourage others to look into and consider assisting these organizations, or find other similarly worthy organizations that are striving to alleviate this widening and troubling disparity.



(206) 282-2215 - Sales@AdventureTrading.com - 3039 W. Commodore Way, Seattle, WA 98199