What We Learned From Craft Fair #2

Attended our second vendor event today... Spring Fling at a local church fellowship hall... with 8 or 10 vendors participating. Everyone arrived and greeted one another and set up our tables, our displays, our wares. There was a friendly atmosphere as we all prepared to sell our products.

This event, unlike the crop we participated in a few weeks ago, was open to the public and not limited to the 40 or 50 people who had been invited, we expected a good day... what a disappointment!

We were there for 5 hours and the only people who came in the door, besides fellow vendors coming in and out and their family members... were two teenage girls and the mother of one of them.

We DID ask ahead of time what to expect in terms of traffic flow and were told there were people in and out all day at their previous event... not so today!

I'm not sure just exactly what the head of this event did to promote the Fling... but I'm pretty sure it wasn't much more than a small poster or two at the edge of the church parking lot, placed there, she told me, on Wednesday afternoon.

We learned something... if you head an event you are responsible for promoting it... that's why we, as vendors, pay a booth rent, right?

Would we have sold much today? We don't know, but if the people don't know about the event, they don't come, and if they don't come, they don't see, smell and touch our products, and if they don't see the products, they don't buy them... we'll never know now will we? Because the event wasn't properly promoted. Actually wasn't promoted much at all.

Next time we sign up for an event, we will ask along with "what kind of traffic numbers do you expect?" we'll also ask "what venues are you using to promote and advertise this event?" Good lesson, but not very good sales today.

On a more optimistic note, we did meet one or two vendors who seemed to have their act together and were interested in networking and sharing ideas via Facebook, email, Twitter, and other venues. We took and gave a few business cards and made a few more contacts... always a good thing!

And I bought some really good smelling candles from Brenda, the Party Lite lady!