First Vendor Event DONE

My husband and I did our first vendor event with the 3D printer today, and all I can say is thank goodness it’s over! This vendor event was at a local middle school, I was extremely disappointed with the turn out, and I am asking myself why the school had it on a day where several other things were going on around town.

This particular event had 48 vendors, no one vendor was the same. They had Scentsy, Pamper Chef, Tupperware, several small craft businesses, several bigger companies, and of course us. We paid a bit extra and got electric so we could take the 3D printer. Last night we took the tables to the school, and first thing this morning we went and set everything up.

Right away we had other vendors and school officials checking out the machine, they all talked on and on about it, however, no one purchased anything. We sold our first item two hours after the event started. We ended up getting a 7 year old girl at our section who decided she was going to hang with us through out the event. While I was okay with this to a point it did get a tad annoying that her parents didn’t watch her. They to had a booth at the event, and we became the “babysitter”. I told my husband I was going to give her parents a bill for babysitting.

She did keep us entertained though with some of the things she said. We did pick up for a bit, we got a lot of kids interested in what we had to offer, but the ones who had parents there wouldn’t give them money instead they purchased items for themselves at another booth. We had several kids purchase items such as our earrings, the zombie ear-bud holders, keychains, and a yoda head.

Several vendors were breaking down early because it seemed as if the only people there were the vendors and their kids. We ended up packing up two hours before the show was supposed to be over, because there were maybe a few dozen people left and no-one was buying.

We almost broke even with the price of the booth, keyword ALMOST. We will not let the poor advertising or poor choice of day ruin other events. We will just keep an eye out for more events, and go from there. I was very shocked to see the birdhouses, birder feeders, tiki planters and dissectable frog didn’t sell.

We did have a few people tell us we should take the dissectable frogs to the school board and see about getting them to move away from the real deal. According to the football Coach they pay 8 to 10 dollars PER frog. We’re not sure when we will attend our next event, but until we do I will be setting up in our driveway, nothing better than a free setup!

Tomorrow things will get back to normal around here.