Craft Fair Preparation (and results!) and GREAT NEWS!

Holy Crap, I had a post all set up before the craft fair showing my progress, but my camera wasn't connecting to my computer, so I had no pics.

:(

But with the purchase of a card reader, all is well again! So, I'll just show a few pics of some things I made, my very Spartan setup, and we'll go from there.

Craft Fair Re-hash:
This was my first one, so I had no idea what to expect. It was in the Lower Level of the building I work in, and everyone who works in the building (18 floors worth) receives an email about it.  I expected heavy traffic, but I joined the fair so late, that there was no way I would try to make sure I had tons of inventory. I didn't let it worry me.

Instead, I made a couple simple items--coasters and potholders, and then put a couple of my favorite arm warmer designs out:

Here's a closeup of the display for my long arm warmers. As expected, they caught the eye of every person that walked in, because it was higher than the rest of my items.

Personal Craft Fair Lesson: Play with varying heights to draw the customer's eye.

And here is a closeup of how I displayed my coasters (in the burgundy box in pic 1):

I used a nice granite-type paper left over from my job to print out these tags, and just found some clip art and played around with the 'logo' for something easy.

I approached this craft fair as more of a general marketing opportunity than a selling opportunity. I merely wanted people (my coworkers especially) to know of my abilities, my openness to creating customized items, and to sign up for a mailing list that would allow me to let people know when my shop opened.

At the end of day (I decided to only set up for the latter half of the fair, from 12-3), I walked out with four custom orders, 10 email addresses, and two of my items had been purchased. Not bad for a first craft fair. I have work! Huzzah!

You can probably see where I'm going with this. I have thought long and hard about my decision, and will be opening up the Etsy shop that I had once put on hold. There was just something tugging at me to go for it, and I'm taking the plunge. I've developed designs for when I first open the store, have more in queue for the months to come, and thanks to the Indie-Business: Compass course I bought earlier this year, I have a pretty fleshed out start to a business plan.

I'll keep ya updated on that.

~A~