Give-and-Take Brings Peace to Gift Show : Vendors and Buyers Try to Live With Once-Controversial Tent Areas

Amid silver, brass and turquoise necklace strands imported from India, Mani Narasimhan, with no customers to tend to, munched on a cheese sandwich in her exhibition booth at the California Gift Show.

“I’m not used to sitting around,” said Narasimhan, owner of India Crafts. “So far, there has been no traffic here,” she said of her new location--under one of the tents along Figueroa Street at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

“I’m sure they are trying to do a good job,” she said of the new management at the 52-year-old show. “But after 17 years, they shouldn’t have put me in the corner like this.”

But don’t be mistaken: Serious business was afoot at the show, which ended Thursday. Buyers were under pressure to predict what products--whether lacquered wooden belt buckles or piano-shaped watches--will catch their customers’ fancy.

“How well we do in the next six months is attributable to how we buy here,” said Wallace Dolliver, who runs a gift shop with his wife, Shirley, in South Lake Tahoe. (The Dollivers once loaded up on $850 worth of candles shaped like sunbursts. “We died on those,” said Shirley Dolliver, “it took us three years to get rid of them.”)

Some exhibitors count on the show for 25% of annual sales. With so much riding on the show, several vendors were upset when AMC Trade Shows Ltd. scrapped a long-held seniority system that determined who got what space. Under the old system, exhibitors were assured the same space they occupied at the previous show.

In its place, AMC, a subsidiary of the Atlanta Merchandise Center owned by John Portman, grouped the exhibitors into about a dozen categories to make it easier on the store buyers. “It was543236212said Jerry Goldberg, who supervised four buyers for J. C. Penney stores. “It was so discombobulated.”

But, in the process, many exhibitors lost their highly coveted spots in the convention center’s main hall, and many claimed AMC had discriminated against minority firms by placing them in the tents--considered the show’s least desirable location.

Sam Williams, president of AMC Trade Shows, denied those claims: “It has nothing to do with ethnicity.”

To lure more buyers into the tents, AMC placed food booths and stages nearby and installed red and white carpets inside to cover up oil-stained concrete floors that once served as a parking lots. “I like the Oriental bazaar effect,” said Kathy Scofield, a six-year show veteran and owner of Scofield Imports in Santa Monica, which sells cotton jackets from Nepal and wooden wine casks from Tibet. “I’m favorably impressed.”

The buyers also liked the results. Greg Glasgow, owner of Southern Port Traders, an ethnic arts and crafts shop in Morro Bay, said: “I don’t have to waste my time cruising every square foot of this place to get what I want.”