Event Talk: Kaleidescope Bazaar

Hello and welcome back my lovely readers. I hope you had a wonderful weekend. Today I want to talk a bit more about crafting for a living and selling at craft fairs and the like. I promise we will be back to talking about yarns on Monday (I already have the post written so I have no excuse this time!) but I just want to share some of the things I've been learning about the business that I wish I had known when I started. It all has a lot to do with the last couple of events I have been selling at.

At this point I have worked six events, two pirate/LARP events, three craft shows and one comic convention and I've only really done well at the convention (ignoring the wonderful fluke of selling some of my stock to a reseller who also sell at conventions). This weekend was definitely no exception and probably the worst I have ever done only selling a pair of gloves and one octopus. It was a small local craft show in it's first year but enough of the other vendors did well enough for me to guess that this is just not my niche. I hoped that there would be parents and grandparents looking for christmas presents who would at least buy my toys, but sadly no. The show was well run and advertized so I think craft shows are just not it for my work.

I would consider just working on getting my work out there and selling online, but I love working events. I love getting to meet people and talk to them about my craft. I love getting to meet other vendors. And it is much easier to gauge your prices when you can see customers responses to them in person. This means I have to focus on finding and getting into conventions. They are less common than craft shows and I am competing with other very talented artists in the area of which there are many) for limited table spaces, and for the larger shows tables can be very expensive. San Diego Comic Con runs in the thousands for tables, but you definitely get what you pay for in the number of potential customers. I'm not aiming that high any time soon, but there are enough cons in my area to hopefully make things work.

So that would definitely be some of my advice for someone trying to get into selling your wares, find your niche, and stick to it. If you want to sell My Little Pony, Pokemon, and Super Hero plushies, maybe you should stick to cons or online. Here's to hoping the next ones go better so we can afford to get into some of the bigger conventions. I hope this is helpful to someone and not just me ranting. It is always a learning process in this business and as long as I take away something new, I guess I can't consider any event too much of a flop.