bathgeek
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2017
- Messages
- 241
- Reaction score
- 148
(Yay I’m finally at three months!)
My first craft fair was yesterday! A couple of learning points I got:
1. Too many soap vendors! There were maybe 25 stalls in total. Three were soap. Thankfully I was off in a hall and was not in the main area with all the other soap vendors. The other two were right across from each other!
2. Branded bags are amazing for generating buzz. I bought plain blank white paper bags and used a 3” x 4” stamp to stamp on both sides of my bags. At the fair, a few people came up and said, “So HERE is the Bath Geek stall! We saw your bags all over the place and we were wondering where you were.” The bags generated buzz, which made me super happy. Considering this was me improvising as I couldn’t afford nice bags but still wanted a standout and that stamp was a mis-measured order that I repurposed? Super happy at the result.
3. Flat shelves are better than shelves made with rods with canvas strung on top. Really. Lots of soap avalanches happened and bars fell off my shelves because they’d overbalance.
4. Knowing the fair was super helpful. By far and away my best seller was bath bombs. Teenagers seem to REALLY love those things. Knowing I was going to be at a prep school, I made extra and I sold 2/3 of my bombs. Nothing else sold like them.
5. Square has a cash option so I can still keep track of inventory. I didn’t realize this, and was dividing my sales records between Square and the WooCommerce POS because I thought I needed the POS to record cash sales (to keep track of inventory). At the end when I was packing up, I took a second look at the Square app and then kicked myself. I could have consolidated EVERYTHING! Bad Ai.
My first craft fair was yesterday! A couple of learning points I got:
1. Too many soap vendors! There were maybe 25 stalls in total. Three were soap. Thankfully I was off in a hall and was not in the main area with all the other soap vendors. The other two were right across from each other!
2. Branded bags are amazing for generating buzz. I bought plain blank white paper bags and used a 3” x 4” stamp to stamp on both sides of my bags. At the fair, a few people came up and said, “So HERE is the Bath Geek stall! We saw your bags all over the place and we were wondering where you were.” The bags generated buzz, which made me super happy. Considering this was me improvising as I couldn’t afford nice bags but still wanted a standout and that stamp was a mis-measured order that I repurposed? Super happy at the result.
3. Flat shelves are better than shelves made with rods with canvas strung on top. Really. Lots of soap avalanches happened and bars fell off my shelves because they’d overbalance.
4. Knowing the fair was super helpful. By far and away my best seller was bath bombs. Teenagers seem to REALLY love those things. Knowing I was going to be at a prep school, I made extra and I sold 2/3 of my bombs. Nothing else sold like them.
5. Square has a cash option so I can still keep track of inventory. I didn’t realize this, and was dividing my sales records between Square and the WooCommerce POS because I thought I needed the POS to record cash sales (to keep track of inventory). At the end when I was packing up, I took a second look at the Square app and then kicked myself. I could have consolidated EVERYTHING! Bad Ai.