Well, we managed to survive our first Craft Fair without any mishaps and having sold our very first images!
I won’t lie – it was a very long day and seemed fairly slow at times but proved to be well worth the effort, as we learned a lot from the day.
We arrived early, so as to grab one of the few parking spaces outside the hall and avoid having to cart all of the equipment and pictures for any distance, and made our way to a small Deli in Thame High Street for breakfast – what a good decision that was! As it turned out, that was the only food we had time for until we scrambled back there after the fair had finished.
What did we learn from the day? The most obvious thing was that we didn’t present the goods in the right way, despite having followed a lot of other people’s advice and we’ll do it differently next time.
Space is at a premium at these events and we will need to build a display that sits higher on the table to enable more products to be displayed.
We’ll also focus on offering more framed pictures as these proved more popular than the mounted prints (which was a surprise to me).
We’ll also make sure that we stand behind the table – this goes against all of the advice we were given but we found that we were having to constantly move from one end of the display to the other to get out of peoples way and allow them a better view of the goods.
Kathy did a brilliant job of engaging with everyone (she’s a natural) - although she did take one lady by surprise by welcoming her with the question “why did you turn left and not right when you entered the room?” This was after I’d mentioned that I’d been trying to work out whether there was a common factor in their choice – the only reason I could come up with was that I was scaring them off!
Anyway, we came out unscathed and with a small profit in our pockets – probably just enough to buy breakfast on our next adventure, which just happens to be in a couple of weeks time – more on this soon.
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