Peddling My Wares Part 1
Oh my goodness you guys. These past few weeks have been so, so busy getting ready for my first ever vendor event. In between finishing work for the semester, mowing in between rain drops, all my other chores and commitments, I was able to get everything done for the big day (this past Saturday)! I have another blog post ready to share all the deets about the actual day, but let's talk about what it took to get ready for the big day.
I had a definite aesthetic in mind when I thought about what I wanted my booth to look like. Rustic, but shabby chic too. The first thing I knew I was going to use was my quilt. I bought the quilt at an antique store in Virginia a few years ago when I met me folks there for a long weekend. It used to be on our guest bedroom at our previous house but now it just sits in a closet. It was definitely time to break it out!
I had lots of ideas in mind when I thought about what I wanted to sell. I knew I wanted to try to sell some of my pictures. Remember the story about thinking I was ordering postcards but they ended up be prints. 220 prints?!?!? Well, I matted some of those prints and then packaged up the others into individual photo sleeves. I also had some pictures turned into postcards. I bundled some and then sold some individually. You can see that below. I think I ordered 100 postcards.
I made salve. Lots and lots of salve. I think I ended up with somewhere around 40 jars of 4 ounce salve and just about the same with 2 ounce tins of salve. This salve though. It's made with 3 ingredients: sunflower oil, beeswax, and essential oil. What I love about it though is that all these ingredients are made within 200 miles of my little homestead. The sunflower oil is from the Hudson Valley, the lavender essential oil is from Doylestown, PA, and the beeswax is from local farms. I love that. I also love that the sunflower oil is more absorbent than coconut oil. It isn't as 'greasy' feeling. Anyway, there was a lot of salve made!
Matted and individual pictures below. I threw in my orchids as props along with some of my chicken paraphernalia. I had to have room for my friend who was vending with me so there's a little space at the end of the table. Oh, our booth space was 10x10.
I had new business cards made. Most of the pics on the business cards were of the chickens so I changed things up a bit this time. I also had Chicken Librarian stickers made that I gave away and also included a sticker in each package sold. I also had handwritten thank you cards to put in each package. Some of the 'behind the scenes' things that aren't shown include those thank you cards along with brown paper bags with Chicken Librarian stickers on them (that I hand-labeled each bag...all 75 of them) and coordinating brown tissue paper with black polka dots. I printed tons and tons of stickers, labels, and cards. I haven't had a chance to tally up how much I spent and part of me doesn't really want to! But I need to. I also registered Chicken Librarian in my state, set up a checking account, and registered for sales tax in the state I was selling in. I ordered my PayPal Here thingy so I could take credit cards. It was all so very official.
A new product I added was lip balm. I had those lip balm tubes just lying around so I thought I would finally use them. I used sunflower oil, beeswax, essential oil, along with olive oil. I made two different kinds. The tube lip balms are all citrus mint. The small tins below are citrus mint or lavender. I also had a left over candle from when I made candles in December for Christmas gifts. The issue with candles is that they take a LOT of product to make so I don't know if they would be cost effective or not. I spent a lot of time figuring out how much each individual item costs--including the container, label, ingredients, etc. It's very interesting to break things down like that.
And then there's the knitted goods. I ended up knitting 4 hats, a pair of arm warmers, and finishing two pairs of gloves. That doesn't include the hats and headband that I had already.
I did a dry run on my booth space set up. I didn't buy any of the baskets or display pieces. I had all of that. So that definitely saved on cost. Things that aren't really pictured are my rack cards and the little plant stand they were on. Plus I had a basket of herbs on the ground. I did have to buy the plants for that display. It was a crazy week of running around getting everything done. I ended up getting the gloves finished on Thursday but then needed to block them, let them dry, and then label them. Did I mention that I printed every. single. label? I would do a batch of something (say, salve) then after it was cooled I would have to label the top and the bottom. The top label was just a Chicken Librarian sticker. The bottom had the ingredients. I spent some time at the FedEx/Kinko's place before school was out just printing, printing, printing. I think the labels turned out great though! Avery changed the look of the brown kraft labels so that was a little disappointing, but other than that everything turned out great. It was a lot of work, and the expense was costly I'm afraid, but I think in the end it was worth it to get everything done and ready to sell. I hope to continue to do vendor events so the expense of getting ready will be spread out over several events, therefore making it less painful. But in the meantime, I'll be back next week with details on how the actual event went.