[National Pearl]

Attending a recent show in Vegas, we saw many Akoya pearls that were in the 6-7.5mm range that were claimed to be "Japanese" Akoya. The quality looked just fine, so I was puzzled why they would feel the need to claim that they were 100% "japanese" akoya, when we knew they had been cultured and harvested in china.

On another note, our interest in visiting the show wasn't to purchase strands, but rather to see new designs and non-traditional pieces that might make a nice addition to our local and online business. We didn't see much of interest in the akoya arena, but we did see some nice designs that incorporated the multi-color tahitians. very nice. We do not currently have any direct connections with Tahitian farmers, and do not feel we are quite big enough to venture into such a heavy investment since our exposure on the internet is quite small (we have not quite reached our year mark online) and our local business demographics would not support high-quality tahitian or south sea.