Showing posts with label Craft Fairs/Shows. Show all posts

Whew! Four nights camping and three days selling at Faerieworlds is quite the experience. Here's some fun pics from my camping/vending time at the festival. The first picture is me in my booth with a pink faerie garland in my hair. Check out the chandelier- we actually had power and it looked so enchantingly sparkly lit up.
The Faerie in black is actually a customer wearing my freshwater pearl birds nest earrings. I sold jewelry to faeries, gypsy's, belly dancers, escapees from Renaissance fairs, elves, and all manner or strange and magnificent creatures.

Whew! It sure is a lot of work getting ready for a multi-day festival. Faerieworlds is coming up this week. I've been busy making as much jewelry as I can, figuring out how I want my displays to look, etc...
Faerieworlds is a festival held outside of Eugene, Oregon. Ed , Emily, and I will be camping directly behind our booth. It is pretty cool that they have the vendors camp behind their booths so we are close to our product.
I'll post some pictures of my booth and the festival soon!!

Check out Faerieworlds at their website: Faerieworlds.com

If you've been making jewelry for awhile and are looking for ways to grow as a business owner and jewelry designer, I'll outline some tips that I've learned that may be of benefit to you. First of all, it is important to realize that success does not just happen, it is the result of lots of hard work, planning, and creative thinking. So first thing I'd suggest is to come up with a business plan and do some brain-storming. Each jeweler has their own style- come up with something that reflects who you are, something unique, that can be a reflection of what you want to get across to the customer. Ask yourself these questions:
1. What is different about my product and how does it stand out from my competition?
2. How can I capitalize on those differences to make my product tell a story? A story about who I am, what my design style conveys, and the overall feel of my product line. For instance- Does your product have a whimsical theme, a nature inspired theme, a modern geometrical theme, a classical, contemporary, or organic theme? Do you use a lot of natural stones, silver, glass, pearls, etc... If you consistently have customers use the same words to describe your jewelry- that is the theme that is coming across.
3. Once you have come up with a thematic direction for your product- it is time to create branding.
I have a consistent dragonfly theme that I use in my business cards, earring cards, tags, website banner, and craft faire booth banner. I use a similar picture/logo on each which has my web address included (super important). I was able to put together the design of all of these with the help of an Etsy graphic artist: For Keeps . She did all of the design work for the business cards, earring cards, website banner, and booth vinyl banner, giving me a cohesive look. I then took the earring cards and had them printed at Vista Print (as business cards)- super cost effective. I had the business cards printed at Overnight Prints (they have a high end glossy uv coating which I love). I had Redhead Diva (another Etsy artist) print the stickers for my boxes. I printed the hang tags myself on my printer. The front of the hand tag also doubles as a logo/avatar. The website banner was easy to load onto my website and Etsy site. Lastly the vinyl banner was taken care of by For Keeps- she works with a company that does the printing and shipping of these. The vinyl banner is excellent quality- thick waterproof vinyl. It has heavy duty grommets, perfect for hanging. The tricky thing about something large like a vinyl banner is that it must be created in a scaled vector graphics format. You cannot take your website jpeg banner and send it off to be printed as a vinyl banner. It will not scale correctly and look horrible. A graphic that is created as a vectorized graphic (using Adobe Illustrator, etc..) could be printed on a business card or printed on the side of a bus and will look exactly the same. So, having said that, it is helpful to have someone create the graphic and send it off in the format that will work.
Once your created your branding, you'll find that you are much more memorable in the customers mind. Imagine you are a customer and have walked around a big craft fair looking at booths or browsed through a website, like Etsy, looking at jewelry. The more you see a business's name, the more your will remember that business. That is why a catchy business name, web presence, and branding are so important. Stay tuned for more about picking the right business name and creating a web presence in future Jewelry Business Tips installments.

Shop Handmade this Christmas Season!

This is a great year to buy handmade and what better place then the Eugene Holiday Market. This is a picture of my booth this year (an ever evolving project). If you are in the Eugene, Oregon area be sure to stop by Holiday Market (at the Lane County Fairgrounds) for some great Christmas shopping. I'm located in booth #20 for the next two weekends. We are open from 10-6 on Saturday and Sunday. Holiday Market is a collection of over 300 artisans. All of the items for sale are made and sold by the artist. Be sure to also check out the great food booths and live music.

Merry Christmas!!

My Analysis:
I just got back from being a vendor at the Portland Holiday Food and Gift Festival and thought I would give the lowdown on this event for any vendors who might be considering participation. The event was last weekend (Nov. 7-9th) at the Portland (OR) Convention Center. The convention center is a great building and the logistics of load-in and parking were fairly easy. However, the show overall was not very successful. Speaking for myself, I broke even, when you add show fees, hotel, food, time, etc... I think that I actually did better then a lot of the vendors around me. The show cost $585 for a 10x10 spot plus $79 for electricity (absolutely necessary -lighting is so important). I arrived on Thursday (with my Mom to help, which was wonderful) and easily found the load-in area at the back of the convention center. Right across the small back street from the load-in is free 20 min. parking and the vendor parking lot which cost $25 (cash only) for the weekend (no overnight parking).
It is easy enough to park in the vendor parking and walk the short distance to load-in your booth. I stayed at the Red Lion which is about a block away and very convenient. The rooms were three star quality (recently redecorated), clean and perfectly acceptable for the price. The parking at Red Lion was $10 per night. However, if you have a big truck like me you might want to figure out a way to park it early in the SMALL lot because the spaces fill quickly and it can be extremely stressful trying to park anything but a tiny car in those little spots.
The food at the show was good and the booth/vendor mix not bad. The convention center is a great venue and has the bonus of having a Starbucks in the lobby. There were lots of gourmet food and wine booths, handcrafted items (good quality) and art. However, there were also some imports and I prefer shows where most items are made by the artist/seller. The traffic was surprisingly light. At one point the artist across from me said you could throw a bowling ball down the aisle and only hit vendors. That was not far from the truth on Friday. The traffic picked up Saturday and Sunday but it was still not enough. The show had advertised that it had 18,000 customers the previous year. I would be surprised if there were actually half that amount. The customers were actually a different crowd then I normally have in Eugene. I'm used to the customer who loves to buy local (shop at local markets) and will pay extra for organic because it promotes a healthy lifestyle. This show just a different demographic. Overall I would rate this show 2 stars. It was well organized, beautiful location, decent mix of vendors, just not well attended. It might be the slow economy and the early date (it was hard to listen to Christmas music the first weekend in November) but in the end it was a good experience just not one that I will be repeating next year.