I have less than 3 weeks until my first major craft show. Can we just take a second for me to freak out? Haha. Only half kidding. I’ve met with the gal I’m sharing a booth with (hi, Rachel!) and she was both super sweet and super helpful, so for a little while I was less stressed about the whole thing. But now it’s creeping up and I’m getting all anxious again. And it’s not even like I haven’t been getting stuff done that needs to be done for it! I got my table skirt sorted this past weekend, and already have my custom order form and lookbook updated and printed out. I signed up for Mailchimp to start a newsletter and have a sign-up sheet for that. I’ve got battery-operated lights for my booth. And extra business cards. And extra bookmarks. And I have been printing up a storm in hopes of hitting some mystery number of perfect amount of prints. Witness:
It’s a 2-day event, and supposed to attract between 8,000-10,000 people. I have no idea what the ideal amount of inventory is for a situation like that. I’ve heard everything from ‘expect to sell 10% of your total inventory’ to ‘bring enough to fill your booth once over for every day of the event’ to ‘expect sales to 5% of foot traffic’ and about a dozen other formulas. So I’m basically just printing as much as I can and still have time to trim and bag and tag everything. It’s the most I can do, right? So it’ll have to do. But it doesn’t keep me from fretting. I didn’t have any of the booth setup stuff (table, spinning rack, grid walls) before this, so between that and the booth fee is a not insignificant amount of money sunk into this venture. I’d like to at least make that back in sales. It might be a blessing that I don’t have any idea of what to expect, so I don’t really have a concrete sales goal, other than make back my investment. Ideally, I’d like to do even better than that, but I’m not setting a number.
Our booth is right smack up front when you enter from the lobby, so that’s got to be good, right? And my stuff is colorful and eye-catching, which I can only imagine helps.
Cross your fingers for me (or more specifically, my sanity in the coming weeks). And if you’re in Austin, please stop by the show on the 16th & 17th. 🙂
Ever done a craft show with your shop? Do you get all nervous beforehand still or are you an old pro?
