Tag vendor events

Vending Events : Part 2?

Octojelly Crochet Studio,LLC Leave a comment

So I’ve had a few people reach out to me about planning for events.

I start planning my vending event calendar in January/February of that year. The Cons and large outdoor events start applications for events that soon.

There’s one event that I try to do every year in January that releases their applications in March for the next year. I’ll find out in roughly 16 days if I’ll be a vendor at the 2024 event.

This is why it’s important to do the research on the events you would like to vend at. Now, there are smaller events that will be looking for vendors right up to the day of the event,and I know people who do really well at those. I’m, personally, not at fan of them, but then most of those events aren’t events where my product does well at.

That’s another thing, don’t feel like you have to do every single vendor event someone says you should do. Try to find events that work for your product.

I make primarily fantasy and ttrpg based amigurumi. The more traditional craft shows don’t work for selling my product.

Does that stop me from recommending the shows to other vendors I know whose product would sell well at them? No.

Also, I made a theme change and had my technical support fix the category links so that they now link where they are supposed to go. There will be a shop update in the next few weeks, and possibly some better videos uploaded on YouTube before the end of the summer.

Why Vetting A Vendor Event Matters

Octojelly Crochet Studio,LLC 1 Comment

So you’re interested in doing vendor events, or you’ve only done local to you events that have been around forever and you’ve decided to branch out to areas that are out of your comfort zone of doing a vendor event.

You’ve probably seen, in doing your general vendor event research and seen other people mention that you should always vet the event, get visitor numbers and average sales numbers from other vendors who have done the event. If you’re going to an event being set up by an event coordinator, you should research the company, find out what shows they have done, and how successful they were.

This is my second year doing vendor events.

The event I was at on May 20th, is a very good example about why I should have taken my own advice. I have never once properly vetted an event, I always, even when it wasn’t an event where my product would do well at, I always made a few hundred dollars.

This particular event was 2 hours from my house, and had an early enough set up time that I got a hotel room. My break even for this particular show (table fee, hotel, gas) was $200. I made less than $30. I ended up leaving 2 hours early due to really, really poor turn out.

What I found out afterwards, which I would have known ahead of time if I had done the research about the show that I should have done, was that this particular event was in it’s first year, there were 40 plus shows going on in the same town that same weekend and it was graduation weekend there.

The event coordinator (EC here on out) apparently does a car and craft event at the same location in October that always does really well. The consensus among some of the more experienced vendors was that because the location does well in the fall, the EC decided that a show in the same location in Spring would do equally as well.

I have a show, locally, next weekend, it’s also a first year event, but they do events every other weekend and always has a good turn out. After that, I have no events until Cosplay World Richmond in August. There will be a shop update in 2 weeks and probably another blog update too.