BOISE — While it might be a little early for many of you to start your Christmas shopping we know planning your holiday gifts is probably on your mind.
A lot of people find it helpful to come up with a theme for their gift buying, and a popular theme is sharing local products with loved ones and friends.
For today's Keeping' It Local segment we thought it would be fun to visit the Buy Idaho showroom to get some ideas.
This is a great place to get great ideas for the holidays and who better to talk to about that than the executive director of Buy Idaho. I want you to meet Sandy Anderson, you are really at the epicenter of Idaho products and we know a lot of people want to buy local. Sandy, how can they do that, and especially during the holiday season?
Well, we are a great place to get ideas for Idaho products. Our showroom is packed with lots of fun Idaho ideas. We have for example Proof Eyewear, a local Idaho company. You can look around the showroom we have candies and honey and sauces and lots of great specialty foods. But then we also have a lot of other unique products. Maybe you want to do a gift certificate for house cleaning or restaurants or things like that. We can give you lots of good ideas there, too.
Idaho has a very vibrant business community, a lot of local products to choose from. How do you help those companies? What does Buy Idaho do?
We are a business association, so when members join out network we help promote them through the showroom, through networking events. We do a lot of things to try and connect businesses with other businesses, so there's a lot of collaboration within the business community.
That's got to be fun.
It is fun.
Alright, you've got an event coming up that would be really helpful if you're like me and you don't have a lot of time to be out scavenging around trying to find things. Tell me about what you have to help get people in touch with these companies.
We have your one-stop shop. December 6th, during the First Thursday festivities in downtown Boise, Buy Idaho will be at the Linen Building hosting a holiday market. We're going to have about 40 different vendors on display, jewelry, bath and body products, specialty food items, just a great place to check everyone off your shopping list. Local beer and wine, and of course no celebration is complete without Santa. Santa will be there as well.
Bottom line how does buying Idaho help Idaho as a whole?
Well, when we buy local it helps those local businesses, so that's the first step. It also keeps taxes in Idaho and those sales taxes then are used for all different kinds of public services, the infrastructure of our state, really keeps those dollars local and then creates jobs so that more people are able to stay in Idaho and work in Idaho and live and enjoy our state.
Well, thanks for what you do and having a great showroom!