How long do you actually need in Lecong?

This question gets asked before almost every first trip, and the answer people want is a number. The number depends almost entirely on how narrow your brief is, so it is worth working through the honest version.

One day: a single category, with a list

A day is enough if you arrive knowing exactly what you are hunting. Dining sets. Or sofas. Or office seating. With a written list you can cover three or four centres, hold real conversations in eight or ten showrooms, and leave with a shortlist and prices.

What a day does not allow is changing your mind. There is no time to discover that the category you came for is not right and pivot to another. If your brief is fixed, one day works. If it is exploratory, one day produces confusion.

Two days: broader, but tight

Two days lets you cover more categories or go deeper into one. It is enough to see the top of the market, work your own price level properly and start a second conversation with the suppliers who matter.

It is also the length most people choose and the one that most often ends slightly rushed, because the second day gets used for more looking rather than for going back.

Three days: the one that produces orders

Three is the point where the trip changes character. Day one covers ground, day two goes to the workshops, and day three is spent returning to the three or four suppliers who survived.

That third day is the valuable one and the one people cut when they are managing a budget. It is where the specification gets nailed down, where the price settles, and where you find out how a supplier behaves in a second, more detailed conversation. Trips without it tend to finish by email a fortnight later, from much further away, with more room for misunderstanding.

A week: only if you have a reason

A week is right for a project with many categories, for a first trip that is also a market study, or for a buyer intending to build several supplier relationships at once. Without a reason like that, a week in Lecong becomes repetitive by day four, and tired buyers make worse decisions than fresh ones.

What actually eats the time

• Distance between centres. The buildings are far apart and the transitions add up.
• The size of each building. One large centre absorbs three hours easily.
• Good conversations. A productive showroom visit takes forty minutes, not ten, and those are the visits worth having.
• The evening. An hour every night matching photographs to prices, which is not optional if you want the trip to be useful afterwards.

The most common regret

Not “we should have seen more showrooms”. It is almost always “we should have gone back to that supplier” or “we should have visited the factory”. Both are consequences of a trip that was one day too short.

A note on planning

Days get lost in the gaps: working out which building holds your category, sitting in traffic between two centres that turned out to be in opposite directions, arriving at a workshop that could not receive visitors that day. A route planned in advance by someone who knows the district removes most of that, which in practice is worth close to a full day on a three day trip. That is usually the difference between coming home with a shortlist and coming home with an order.