Tea Farm Cottage

We thought we had learned our lesson, but apparently not!

We decided this past spring to NOT participate in any more craft fairs in super small venues... no more church fairs, school fairs, or businesses simply promoting themselves by hosting small fairs... well, we did it again! Tea Farm Cottage, a lovely arts, crafts, and antique shop in Summerville, SC, has hosted a "First Saturday Arts and Crafts Fair" for about 3 or 4 months this summer and fall in the front yard of their charming establishment. After speaking at length via email to the cottage owner, Deborah, we decided to participate in the October fair... she had assured us of plenty of shoppers, lookers, and a variety of other festival participants who were returning every month successfully.

Apparently one of the main crowd drawing vendors, a Jamaican jerk chicken cooker, experienced car trouble the morning of the event and canceled at the last minute... at least that's the story we heard... he drew in the crowds with the aroma and flavor of his Caribbean flavors and they shopped... at least they had in August, and again in September... but his cancellation in October appeared to put a damper on everyone's buying spirits.

We enjoyed our day at Tea Farm Cottage, met some really nice people, traded business cards and email addresses, we even met and picked the brain (as he picked ours) of another soaper, but we didn't make a great deal in sales... but I have to say, neither did anybody else there. The other soaper planned to complain and hoped to be refunded, at least in part, of the festival rental fee... we didn't even try, just chalked it up to experience once again.

We had several sniffers stop by our tent, drawn in by the scent of our soap and by the novelty of our cupcake shaped soaps... we got many many comments about how real they looked, how great they smelled, how interesting, how novel... We got a lot of smellers, but not too many buyers.

We did sell some soap to the pottery vendor, Janet, who fell in love with our products... she makes beautiful pottery and clay sculptures and is a really cool lady, as is her husband. I, in turn, fell in love with her work and after she had purchased the soap from us, I remarked that I was just about to see if she would trade a few bars of soap for a lovely blue, round soap dish she had designed and made (I make round soap and wanted that dish badly)... she tried a sample of our lotion... then came back and said, "I tell you what, I'll give you that soap dish you want for a bottle of that great lotion." Of course I readily agreed.

We came away richer even though we didn't make a lot of money, we DO, however, have a beautiful clay soap dish and a few new friends.