Tag: calgary

The Shop: Black Friday Cyber Monday

Sometimes I wonder just where time goes. It’s the end of the fall already! Etsy has this big promotional holiday sale on for the American Black Friday through Cyber Monday weekend and I figured I’d take part by offering Free Shipping in my shops.

I loaded up my latest colour scheme this week – winterflower – which is a navy base with blue flowers. You can see it on a few of the beads in the bead shop or in the flowers in the cane shop:

beads on sale on etsy

canes on sale on etsy

And as always I’ve loaded everything up in my ArtFire shop just the same and it’s also got Free Shipping. ArtFire allows you to purchase without first creating an account so if you just want to zip in and scoop up some beads or canes, no fuss, no muss, it’s the place to go.

Local and need some other good deals? My teammates on the Alberta Team (which should really be the western Canada team by this point) are also offering some great holiday deals this weekend. You can check the list out on the team blog at:

http://etsyalberta.blogspot.com/2009/11/etsy-holiday-sale.html

Now, back to the last minute fixing for my show. I’m doing my regular show in Marlborough Community Hall in Calgary. The hitch? I’m not in Calgary! So I’ll be spending a day of my visit to the city doing the show because it’s my sentimental favourite. Come visit and I’ll give you free beads!

Festival Fun

May 31 I had a booth at the Lilac Festival in Calgary. It’s a very, very big street fair and when the weather is nice it often has in excess of 100,000 people. The weather was amazing and there were an astonishing amount of people.

My booth!

The show is the biggest one I’ve done yet and I’m very pleased with how it went. The money was good, the traffic was unbelievable and best of all the things that need fixing – more stock, better displays, better table layout – are things I can actually do.

Booth inside
I did learn a few things about doing this show, in comparison to the smaller (not all of them were much less expensive mind you – just smaller) shows:

  • Canopy, tent or umbrella is necessary. The booth across from us, with jewelry as well, had some very very sunburned vendors by the end of the day
  • People to help you or a smaller setup. Not both. I could not have run this by myself. I would have had to have a much smaller setup to be able to answer questions, help customers and still keep an eye on things.
  • Enough stock in a variety of price points but avoid anything fussy (in terms of change or items – I damaged one expensive piece.). Accept credit cards. Decide what your policy is about bill size (I won’t accept $100s at shows for example). Decide what to do about hagglers.
  • Put your literature at several spots. At times we were too busy for people to get across the booth to find my pamphlets or other business cards or freebies. So I put bowls with these at each end.
  • Bring a first aid kit, office supplies, a toolkit and water. Make sure you know where they are. I usually also bring tools and items to fix or trade out small components but in this show, there was literally no time for that.
  • A good banner is fabulous. Good signage is also fabulous. I was lucky and my cousin made me a banner with my logo and I have the software to do relatively good signage. It was complimented frequently.
  • Smile, be positive, helpful, cheerful, give your neighbours a hand, try to work with the organizers, volunteers and staff as much as you can.

There are a few more pictures of the parade, friends who dropped by on my Flickr. I’m already looking forward to next year!