Craft Fair Aftermath

So yesterday was the big day. What was my day like you may be wondering. Well, let me give you a little breakdown.

4:15am Wake-Up, Shower, etc

4:50am Pack the Car

5:00am Roll Out

7:00am Arrive at Show Venue and Set-Up

9:00am Show Starts

3:00pm Show Ends and Pack Up

3:30pm Roll Out

4:00pm Arrive At Ellicott City Lotte Mart (Korean Grocery)

5:00pm Stop By Uncle's Laundry Place To Say Hey

5:20pm Get some McDonald's (Because We're Starving!)

5:30pm Roll Out For Home

6:45pm Arrive Home To Clean Up Dogs' Messes In Kitchen (Poor things have been in there for nearly 13 hours!)

7:30pm Enter Coma

7:00am Wake-up Refreshed

Yesterday was completely crazy. Was it worth it? Probably yes. You may be asking yourself why I went to a show nearly 2 hours away. Well, you'll remeber that I moved last week and this venue was litterally 5 minutes from my old house. Since I already paid for it, I might as well go, no?

Where you happy with the show? Yes and no. Did I sell as much product as I was hoping? No. Did I do okay? Yes.

Here were the 2 main problems with that show:

1) They took as many vendors as they could get, literally. So that meant that they oversold their cafeteria by a landslide and decided to just line the vendors up and down all the hallways and even put some in the library. Now this is itself was not a big problem EXCEPT that my booth was in the very back hallway that had barely any lighting and no heat so we didn't get much traffic. Now the front hallway and the cafeteria were well lit and warm and clearly the majority of the traffic was going through there. People just weren't coming all the way back to us wich sorta stunk. I have to say though that I feel the worst for the people they put in the library. I'm sure they had really bad days because you just couldn't tell that there were boothes in there. The bookshelves totally blocked it. In fact, they had to announce on the loud speaker that there were vendor's in there. I would have been totally peeved if I was in there. The really annoying thing was that the organizers told my boothmate that they moved our booth to a better location, which was the back hallway with no heat? I wonder where we were originally going to be. Oh well, no matter, it can't change anything now.

2) People weren't looking. Now honestly, I can't tell you how many people just ran by our booth with their eyes on the floor. It's not like I'm out there attacking people and trying to pull them over to my booth and force them to buy. I simply sit behind my booth and say Good Morning to the people going by. What's the point of going to a craft show if you aren't going to look? Now, I realize that paper goods aren't everyone's cup of tea but you can at least glance at the goods of the table for goodness sake. :)

I stayed up late the three nights before the show making some Easter and Mother's Day cards because I was sure that they would sell. I'll have you know that I didn't have ONE person look at them. I couldn't believe it. For that matter, only ONE person looked at my monogram notecard sets too. Totally crazy I thought. Maybe craft shows just aren't the market for handmade cards? Maybe I need to try a more upscale venue for my cards?

Now, like I said, I didn't do terribly. I actually did responable well. I know that other's in my hallway did not do so well. One lady even left at 2pm saying this was a total waiste of her time. I felt badly for her, because it stinks when that happens. I've been there myself. I was really hoping to do about double what I did take in but again, I did okay. I would probably do the show again but request a table in the cafeteria or one right outside of it. You'd think that they would have assigned the spots based on who signed up first vs. last. Like the people who signed up last would go in the very back hallway where we were and the people that signed up months ago like we did would go towards the front. I guess not though. Oh well, we had fun, met a lot of new crafters, made some connections, and made a little money. All in all, not such a bad day :)