Did My Annual Craft Show

Apparently, after doing about one show per year for ten years, I'm still on the fence on whether or not to do shows.  Ha ha ha!  There is some financial and time commitment involved.  But I gotta tell ya, I did have fun yesterday.

Neither one of us got more than three hours of sleep the night before, me with last minute preparations and my friend with an unexpected incident on her hike earlier in the day.

We still managed to leave at 4:30 am, though.

That gave us a good long time to set-up, which was good because I suddenly couldn't remember how the tent went up.  Ha ha ha!  Oh, I guess it's not really a tent.  It's a Coleman dealie, not an Easy-Up like most other vendors have.

And this brings me to the first thing on my list of things I learned by doing this show.  Do not have a colored roof for you tent.  Everything in my booth had a yellow cast to it.

A couple of things I did this time for the first time that actually DID work out well were:

1. I took my mom's hand weights with us and used them to tied down the corners of the canopy.  There was a good breeze every once in awhile.
2. In the week before the show, I set up my displays inside the living room.  This gave me a good idea of all the tweaks I wanted to make so that I wouldn't be futzing around with things during the real set-up.

 Oh, also, the angled legs of my canopy make for a smaller space than the tents with vertical legs.

Here's something else I learned.  Not everyone's going to agree with me on this, so just accept we all have personal opinions (and who knows, I could change my mind somewhere down the road).

I don't like to make the customer ask the price on everything they're interested in.  I think it makes a lot of them lose interest and makes some of them not even bother to look.  So I went into this wanting to have my pricing visible.  And although it was accessible, I guess it wasn't really VISIBLE... or at least it wasn't obvious.

The prices on the earrings was in pencil on the back of each card, in a lower corner.  Some people didn't bother to look there... others had their finger right on top of the price and said, "There's no price on this one."

The necklaces all had hang tags with the prices, but the tags are draped in the back where the clasp is.  Never dawned on me people would think there are no prices.  D'oh!  I can be a real ditz some times.

And something else you can see from this photo... a tent with walls would have been good.  I adored our neighbors, but it just makes for a more visually appealing booth if there's separation.

And may I mention again how much I adored our neighbors?  Boy, did we get lucky.  They were awesome.

So were the event staff.  My only complaint about the whole show would have been that it didn't seem to be advertised as much as I thought it might be... not online anyway.  But based on the turn-out, maybe they didn't need it.  There was a steady stream of people all day long.

I really enjoyed talking with everyone.  Met some super cool individuals and got to say hi to so many  friends that stopped by (thank you all!).

I'm still singing the praised of my Square swiper.  I did pre-order the chip reader, but I guess we don't get them for another month or so.

Editing this post to add one more photo.  Someone commented on the stand I had in my booth.  Here's a better shot of it.  It completely comes apart and folds up so transport isn't a problem.  I totally, totally love this thing.  There are seven shelves total but here I'm only using four due to my displays being tall.  I used a cloth over the lattice so it wouldn't be see-thru and I used the two shelves beneath the drape (at the bottom) to store my receipt book, etc.

Anyway, super big thank you to Dawn for helping me out with the show and super big thank you to the promoters who let me in at the last minute and super big thank you to everyone who stopped by and said hi.

Also, every single person who came into my booth was awesome.  Everyone was so nice.  I have yet to hear a snarky comment.  Of course, that's probably easy when you only do one show a year.  ha ha ha!

But for all the vendors who have had someone say one of THOSE statements... you know the ones...