halfway through fall / holiday shows for 2012

This past weekend I vended at two different shows: one on Saturday and one on Sunday. Yep, this was pretty crazy. One of the funniest parts about it is how many vendors I met at both shows who also had two shows this weekend. I guess that I'm not the only crazy one.

This was my set up for Saturday. (The lady with the scarves behind my booth to the right was also in a neighboring booth on Sunday.) I'm getting my set up routine down pretty well. I'm usually scrambling to get things set up right until the customers show up, but I was ahead of schedule at both shows this weekend. That was a good feeling.

The guy behind me was selling hand carved spoons and other kitchen utensils. How cool is that? Some of my family members will be getting some of his items for Christmas.

This was definitely the better of the two shows. It was very well run and had some of the best traffic I've seen at a show in quite a while. There were lots of student helpers who did a great job all day, plus the school had lots of carts for vendors to use. For free. I've never seen anything quite like that before, and I can't even tell you what a big difference it made. I didn't have record breaking sales, but I did well enough that I would go back again next year.

Do you see the Packers pillows in the booth next to mine? I did some more Christmas shopping at this show.

Kind of like deja vu, right? It felt like it, too. This show was not as well run, but my bigger complaint was that it wasn't all handmade. I get really upset when there is a big Scentsy booth right near one of the entrances where people will drop $100 and then barely look at most of the handmade products available. I mean no offense to anyone reading this who sells those type of products, but the more shows that I do, the more than I loathe those type of products. It doesn't make me want to participate in these "mixed" shows as much.

The other frustrations:

I had a sale goal for all of my sales this fall, and I have not met it yet. Needless to say, that is a little discouraging. I came close with my Saturday show, but I really didn't with my other two. I still have three more shows, and you never know what will happen, especially as my last show is by far my biggest. If that show is really successful, it could more than make up for the lack of sales at other shows. But that hasn't happened yet so I hate to get my hopes too high.

I have observed a number of neighboring booths who have done well because they have done a lot of shows in the area over the past five years or more and get a lot of return customers. I've only lived here a year and a half so I'm just not at that point yet. Will I really make enough in subsequent years to justify returning to shows that weren't as profitable as I'd hoped the first time around? It's hard to know.

Some more good things:

I was really fortunate at both shows to have more really nice booth neighbors. That has been such a blessing at all of my shows thus far this fall. Even when sales were slow, the company was good. That makes it much easier to stay in a good mood.

Also, on the plus side, do you see how empty my ring rack is in that final picture? That was before the show even started. I have sold a number of those little guys this fall and will be making more before my next show. I am running low on a few other smaller items and will be working on those this week as well.

What's next?

• More rings and other small items. I wish that more higher end jewelry items were flying out of the booth, but at least something is selling. I have my work cut out for me with those projects this week.
• More show schedules. Another success from this weekend's shows is that a lot of people took my printed version of my 2012 shows. I need to get pictures of them. Hopefully they really are driving a little more traffic to some of these shows.
• Splitting up my magnet stocks. Since I started making glass and bottle cap magnets, I've filled a single magnet board with all of them. This means that I've been displaying less button magnets, which I think is a mistake, because they have always been a great show item. So I'm going to devote the board button magnets again and sell my other magnets in a separate display as you can see here. We'll see how that goes. In order to do this for the next show, I need to restock button magnets and make more magnet cards to accommodate all of my glass and bottle cap magnet stock.

I'm setting up for my next fall show on Friday. Needless to say, it's going to be a busy week. I'm hoping that if I can push through with these projects now, it'll mean less work before the final shows of the season.

How are your 2012 fall / holiday shows going thus far?

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