[http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/SFMade-touts-local-products-3549719.php]
If you're in the mood to go shopping in San Francisco this weekend, look for the SFMade sticker in store windows.
You'll find a range of items manufactured by San Francisco companies, from apparel and fashion accessories to house and garden wares, food and mattresses. And 10 percent of your money will go to an organization that has put the "made in San Francisco" label on the national map.
Two years ago, when SFMade started out as a manufacturers' organization, it had just 12 member companies. Now, it has 325 members, with a combined workforce of 3,500, a pop-up shop inside the Banana Republic store in Union Square, another outlet scheduled to open at SFO next year and a bulging file of press clips, courtesy of write-ups in the New York Times, Fast Company magazine and British newspaper the Guardian, among others.
"We can now leverage SFMade as a collective brand," said Executive Director Kate Sofis, who got a shout-out last year from Bill Clinton at a Clinton Global Initiative event honoring local economic development and job creation initiatives.
As the organization has grown, so have its services. It helps manufacturers find commercially zoned space and guides them through the city's tortuous permit process. "We spend a lot of time at the Planning Commission," said Sofis. It also provides educational workshops and other advisory services, including access to capital and to retailers who favor locally made products.
SFMade's budget also has grown, to $500,000 a year, with funding from city agencies, banks and other companies, including Google and Levi Strauss.
Sofis said her organization's main goal remains job creation. Going forward, "We want to focus on growing the footprint of the companies we have and nudge up their employment base."
-- Check out SFMade's website for a guide to Saturday's shopping opportunities. As part of SFMade Week, there's also a factory tour Sunday of Rickshaw Bagworks, whose CEO, Mark Dwight, founded the organization (sfmadeweek.org).
Shoppers from abroad: China has had its eyes on American banks for some time, and now it's got one.
The Bank of East Asia (U.S.A.), with five Bay Area branches, in San Francisco, South San Francisco and Oakland, is being bought by the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. It's the first time the Federal Reserve has allowed a Chinese bank to acquire a U.S. property, and follows agreements reached by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Fed Board Chairman Ben Bernanke with Chinese leaders at the U.S.-China Economic and Strategic Dialogue in Beijing last week.
The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, ranked by Forbes magazine as the world's biggest bank, and the fifth-biggest company in the world, sits on $2.5 trillion in assets, and earned $33 billion in 2011. As Forbes noted last month, "The Chinese banking system is now the third largest in the world behind the U.S. and Japan, and yet it has largely been confined to doing business at home." Until now.
The Bank of East Asia (U.S.A.), with approximately $750 million in assets, is a subsidiary of Hong Kong's Bank of East Asia. While it is headquartered in New York, where it has three branches, much of the bank's business is conducted in California. In addition to the Bay Area branches - the San Francisco offices are in Chinatown and the Inner and Outer Sunset - it has five others in Southern California, mostly in and around Los Angeles.
San Francisco is no stranger to China's state-owned banks. Shanghai's Bank of Communications, the country's fifth-largest with $700 billion in assets, has had a branch in the Financial District for six months.
The public-private group ChinaSF helped the bank set up here in November. "At first, it will be mainly focused on bringing Chinese companies into the U.S. and serving their needs here," Ginny Fang, former executive director of ChinaSF, said at the time.
Perhaps its horizons have broadened.
More treats: If you miss SFMade Week, there's always San Francisco Small Business Week, which kicks off Monday with a gala "Flavors of San Francisco" event at the Metreon. That means there will be some good eats in addition to networking opportunities.
During the week, there will be conferences, award ceremonies and workshops on a range of topics, from local manufacturing and the advent of B corporations to government contracts and doing business in China (sfsmallbusinessweek.com).
Cleaning up: We already have one small-business winner to announce. Fleenor Paper Co. of Stockton has been named Northern California Small Business of the Year by the federal Small Business Administration.
CEO Rebecca Fleenor and VP John Rochex will be receiving the award at an event next week.
The 50-year-old family business manufactures environmentally friendly packaging and paper products for a variety of industries, including construction, automotive, moving and storage, and food service.
And it's not all that small. With 300 employees in its five manufacturing plants, plus offices and distribution centers in the United States, Canada and Mexico, its sales are projected to reach $60 million this year.
No "showrooming": One of the bugbears of brick-and-mortar businesses, big and small, is the unfair playing field on which Amazon.com continues to play.
Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Hillsborough, will be hearing from some of those businesses on Friday, including Safeway, Gap and Target, plus local enterprises such as Chain Reaction Bicycles of Redwood City and Woodcrafters of San Carlos.
Speier has sponsored bipartisan legislation that would allow states to mandate the collection of sales tax that out-of-state online retailers, like Amazon and Overstock.com, are still able to evade. This being election season, her bill probably isn't going anywhere for a while, although a California law is due to take effect in September.
It might be interesting to hear from Target, which last week announced it was pulling Amazon's Kindle e-reader from its 1,700 stores to combat the plague of "showrooming," encouraged by Amazon, whereby shoppers check out the goods in brick-and-mortar stores, then go online and buy them cheaper, and without paying sales tax.
The public hearing takes place from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at City Hall in Redwood City, 1017 Middlefield Road.
SFMADE labels placed on Rickshaw Bagworks products in San Franicsco, Calif. on Wednesday February 17, 2010. Photo: Jessica Pons, The Chronicle / SF
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