'Art This Way' Weekend

This weekend was great, I was there all day Saturday and Sunday (2nd and 3rd July) selling my work, talking to people interested in the same things as me and looking at the varied work of other practitioners. What’s more, I managed to sell quite a lot of my products, a lot more than I was expecting to seeing as this was my first attempt at an event like this. It has been a really positive experience and I have learnt a lot from it thanks to the other more experienced creatives selling their work too. 

I wrote down the quantities of everything I took with me so that I could work out how much I had sold at the end. I decided to be organised and I made some tables. From these I can look at what is selling and what isn’t. I am bearing in mind though that the audience at this art fair is quite different to the audience I am able to reach online so I may see some different results with what is most popular on my Etsy shop. 

I did make a profit this weekend after selling around £60 worth of my products. I learnt a lot from this event and the preparation that went into it. 

Pricing: I am gaining a better understanding how to price my products. I was wary that I had overpriced my handmade notebooks as I didn’t sell very many but actually considering the amount of quality paper in the product I feel it was reasonable and I wouldn’t want to sell them for any less. 

Communication: I have noticed that I am becoming more confident when talking to people, this may be because the conversations I was having this weekend were about things I was interested in and had something to say about. I think this is going to be really important for me to keep up, especially if I do another event like this. 

Local networking: I didn’t realise before that there is actually a decent creative scene in my hometown. For the size of the town and surrounding villages, I got the impression that there is quite a lot going on that I could be more involved in. I want to look into doing an event similar to this around the Christmas period, i'm not sure whether this would be in Leeds or Loughborough.

(I think there was some miscommunication with whoever printed the map leaflets but I do consider myself an illustrator, not a graphic designer!)