Unsuccessful Craft Fairs

I now have a new blog address.

To look at this post at jodegenhart.com just click this link- Unsuccessful Craft Fairs

Craft Fairs. We spend the weeks before working our hardest to design and create beautiful hand crafted products. All those late nights, all that care and love that goes into the preparation, making sure our stall looks amazing, thinking about how to show our products off to their best. Perhaps creating new products or making more of ones you already have not to mention all the more boring tasks such as float, bags and labels.

We get to the venue, set up our stall, check it twice, then sit there waiting expectantly for the rush of people who will admire our stall and ultimately buy all of our stock.

Then we sit.

And we sit a little more and after a few hours the atmosphere in the room changes from an air of anticipation to one of hope that perhaps in a few hours more people will come, perhaps after lunch? Then to one of despair that after all that hard work and the Saturday or Sunday that we gave up with family has all been a waste of time.

And then we doubt our products, and whether all this is really worth it.

I did another fair a few weekends ago, at Kenyon Hall Farm. There is a farm shop and a cafe and on a sunny day it is lovely (and very busy). They had donkey rides, food stalls, a barn full of beautiful stalls, some hand crafted and some with lovely produce to sell.

On the day, I woke up to rain. Rain which stayed all day and was probably a big part in how unsuccessful the fair was. The organiser spoke about last year when the sun was out and the place was crowded which feels like a theme to all of the craft fairs I do. There always seems to be a reason as to why this time it has not gone well but on the Saturday at Kenyon Hall Farm I heard one of the other stall holders say 'at what point do we stop blaming the weather, other events or wrong timing and start to think is it us?'.

This self doubt is a killer to your confidence but in all honesty I think that actually the craft fairs that you can do well at are few and far between. The dedicated craft fairs struggle for people to attend and ultimately buy, other than at Christmas when people come out ready to buy gifts. At the Artisan or Vintage fairs, hand crafted products priced to reflect the amount of time it takes to make them are undercut by imported or second hand products. The people around me in the last few fairs had had similar experiences and I must admit that when I looked at their lovely stalls, full of beautiful produce, I took a little hope that actually maybe it was not me but that craft fairs do not suit the type of products I am trying to sell.

I am not sure what the answer is but as I sat there on that Saturday I decided that it really had not been worth all that hard work, all those late nights and that I would concentrate on other areas to show my products to other people interested in what I am creating and see where that takes me.

Jo x