I am late writing this! We finished BCTF on a good Tuesday for orders and when we arrived at the studio on Wednesday Sophie had begun the transformations for her exhibiting her installations at York Open Studios and the place was ‘a little’ topsy-turvy.
We don’t need to prepare so much now for trade fairs, we have a stand design & layout that we are pleased with for the moment; I know how everything fits into the back of Landy and Harrogate is so close to home that I was able to do the set-up alone whilst the girls continued to make all the products for display. I can set up the stand in half an hour – lighting, posters, shelving; it’s as simple as that.
We arrived early on the Sunday and displayed our wares, then waited for the buyers to arrive which they duly did, queuing to get in at 10am. The format is usual, many of them walking around with a big bag, notebook and pen in hand; they take a quick look at your stand, look up at the name board and make a note of your name and stand number if they are interested in your products, then continue on down your isle.
Sunday was a good morning and lunch, we were surprised as normally it is a couple of hours before the buyers start buying; we were busy up to about 3 in the afternoon, then things slackened off and the first day the finishing time was 6pm!
I noticed at this trade fair that there was far more people wearing visitor badges rather than buyer badges. We have done BCTF for four years now and usually the exhibitors have badges printed with “Exhibitor – business name” and the buyers have “Buyer – business name”, visitors could be students, people doing a “recce” for potentially exhibiting next year &c. But this year there were far too many visitor badges and in many instances the buyer badges were handwritten with the business name.
I do think that we are still in the grip of this recession, we were taking plenty of orders but in many cases the yield per order was down; last year many first-time buyers were happy to meet our carriage paid amount - £200, this year many of the first-time orders were c£150.
The general turnout format for buyers/visitor goes like this – Sunday, (mainly) larger independent galleries, gift shops &c; Monday, many museum and visitor attraction representatives and Tuesday seems to be a mix. We noticed this year that, people (buyers/visitors) were far more reluctant to handout information than they have been in past years (could this be due to the amount of spam email people are receiving – maybe); generally the information was going in one direction, from us to them.
Another thing you notice is a growing amount of representatives from other businesses try to sell you things such as membership to associations, insurances, publicity &c.
During the whole event we gained ten new stockists, but we must have met (some) 100 of our existing stockists; we debated (Ruth & I) whether it is worth continuing to do the event, our conclusion was that it is, if only to keep a presence and meet our stockists who we can’t get to see any other time.
We bought a MIFI (mobile WIFI) for the business so were able to keep “blogging” and “facebooking” during the event. This year the organizers gave us access to the hall’s WIFI, but it was uselessly slow.
Monday was a good day and Tuesday (usually a little slower), this year, was fantastic. Bespoke seems to be working really well for us, artistically, there seems nothing that the girls can’t achieve and our “literary” emphasis is getting us into many museums and visitor attractions.
Now the order-book is overflowing, this week we shipped over £3,000 of trade orders, don’t want to keep the stockists waiting too long! Though, it is difficult trying to keep that level of productive output for too long. The phone and email keeps pinging with new stockists and orders, it really does keep the team motivated. We need to “get a wiggle on” with these orders as we have SELECT@Bath (another trade event) in early May, so clear these trade orders before we catch another load. This is what it is all about, keeping busy, new ideas, new projects, new designs, new products; answering to no-one (but the tax man)!
Next review will be SELECT@Bath.
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