*steps off soapbox*
Anyway, onto the fun stuff: my craft show!
Overall, we did pretty well considering I tried a different strategy. Basically, I've always been known to under-price myself. When you're treating it like a hobby, that seems like an okay thing to do. But recently, I've decided that this is going to be my career someday, and I've started fleshing out a 5-year plan (if nothing else comes from having an MBA, we have that).
When you start running a business, you realize that underpricing yourself hurts the industry - go ahead and ask me my opinion on Wal-Mart. You're not helping your competitors, so you're not helping yourself. You're just devaluing what it is you live to do - and that doesn't work for a good crafting economy.
That's why this year, I priced everything what they were worth. And luckily for me, I still had sales. Not as many as in previous years, but you know what - I can live with that. My customers were super excited about their hats and know that they're getting a good quality item. Oh, and let's not forget - I had a little extra cash to spend on the other vendors who had some fantastic items on display, too :)
But for next time, I really need to remember my audience. People who buy from my etsy shop are a little different than people who go to these smaller, in-person browsing events. For example, most of my customers online are adults buying hats for themselves, whereas people attending the craft shows are buying items for pre-teens or teenagers. This matters due to sizing - if I make a hat or headband fit for a full-grown adult, it's not going to fit a pre-teen. So that's something to keep in the back of my mind.
Things are back to normal now that Sandy is over and I've re-opened my shop - now it's just time to play catch-up with some custom orders placed last week, as well as another custom order from the craft show. Lots of exciting things seem to be happening at the same time, and I can't wait for two weeks from now when I can officially concentrate more on the shop!
