Local Shows

It's been a hugely busy 8 weeks.  

The Harry Potter Festival in Jefferson in October was.....an experience.  The booth prices were $200, if you wanted electricity it was an extra $100 (we didn't' need it).  I was sharing a booth with another person.  She had the tent, tables, etc. but I did bring some of my own tables.  

The event had presold 20,000 wrist bands two weeks prior to the event, and they expected maybe 30,000 people to come.  Well......they got over 50,000 people.  The huge downside was that the event organizers had only arranged for 20 school buses to move people around as the event was scattered all over Jefferson - a matter of 6 miles from north to south.  People had to wait up to two hours to get on a bus.  It was a disaster that way.

There were three vendor areas. A large one that did get a good number of people, we were in the medium sized one by the football field, and only got customers when the bus came to drop people off. And a small vendor area that apparently nobody found so that did really poorly.  

Weather on Saturday was gorgeous at 75 degrees and sunny.  Weather on Sunday was 48 degrees with rain and high winds blowing horizontally which made for everything in the tent getting wet.  Between 8am and 11am we saw four people we could legitimately call 'customers' walking around in the rain so it was no wonder that the vendors in our area packed up and went home at that point. Sunday was a bust.

I did ok in sales I guess, given that we only had one selling day for it.  However making 3 round trips halfway across the state and back in 3 days (setup, selling and leaving) it put a lot of mileage on the car. No sales happened on Sunday at all.  By the time I got home I'd been soaked to the skin at near freezing temps (factoring in the wind chill) for 6 solid hours. The only reason I didn't get sick was that I had the heater on in the car at full blast for the hour drive home.

Would I do it again?  Not if I'm not in the main vendor area.  

The smaller event I did locally was over in Butler, on the west side of Milwaukee.  It was a Holiday Festival, on a Saturday from 9am to 3pm, in a local school so was indoors.  General age group that showed up to shop were women aged 50-80, very few kids/teens, and any men were being dragged to the event by their wives.  Still, I did a little over $200.  The booth fee was $40 which was split between myself and someone else doing 'halfzies' with me. We had a corner spot so she got an 8 foot table and I got an 8 foot table, which was a good amount of space to spread out on.