Freeform suggestions: Better Roman luxury goods

[DominusNovus]

Ok, this is really broad, so feel free to interpret the question more or less however you'd like. The only restriction I'd like to posit is no serious tech uplifting (so no 'industrial Rome' type scenario).

Many discuss the trade between the Roman world (the Mediterranean and Europe) and those civilizations to their east in terms of Roman specie flowing eastward in exchange for eastern trade goods - spices, silk, etc. That is an oversimplification, and the Romans did have trade goods of their own that those in the east valued. I also think the concern over specie leaving the empire is overstated by those that didn't understand economics as well as we do. But lets just accept the basic framework.

What trade goods could Rome conceivably have that they did not, historically? Ideally, these would be trade goods that were not available in the East, but that is not a requirement. These could be cultivating new crops or species that they could have had access to, but did not (even crops from the east), or manufactures that were appropriate to their level of technology. Consider trade goods from West Africa, Northern Europe, etc.

 

[JanWellem]

Silk, if some Roman envoys had reached China a couple of centuries earlier and managed to nick some silkworm eggs and smuggle them out of the country undetected, and, if some Roman terra sigilata potters in Gaul, after running out of fine clay in the region they were located in, had started to experiment with other locally available materials to make their pottery from instead of moving on, and had stumbled upon caolinite, they might have developped some kind of porcelain .