Vendor Fair #1 of 2010

Friday was the vendor fair (fundraiser) for the American Cancer Society. It was a great learning experience, priceless practice and not entirely a bust. So that’s a positive right? The learning experience and practice comes with each show I do . . . setting up the table and display, figuring out what I’ve forgotten and what I wasn’t entirely prepared for, and interacting with customers to see what they’re most interested in.

I made a couple sales, quite a few contacts, handed out more business cards than I can remember counting and earned more than a couple compliments on my products. I was disappointed, however, with the level of marketing effort taken on by ACS to promote the event. At the end of the day, the last I heard was that they raised about $2k from the event and partnership with GrillSmith’s lunch and they were quite happy about it. Granted, that much money is more than I could afford to give them myself, but I suppose I just had larger expectations. I don’t think they realized what they COULD HAVE raised if they put in the right effort.

That downside behind me, where my table was situated provided me excellent comic relief. My table was at the end of the row, right next to a representative for Mary Kay (who also happened to be an employee of ACS). Throughout the event, employees were coming out to check out the tables and see what was going on and eventually the Mary Kay Gal’s boss made it outside. He did the tour of the tables and then parked himself at the Mary Kay table to “help” his employee sell her wares. From what I was able to tell, he was actually doing a pretty good job. Which was quite amazing because his typical sales pitch was something like, “Hey you . . . do you use Mary Kay? No? You should. Seriously. Trust me. You need it.”

So if that kind of truthful marketing works, I may need to adapt the strategy to my own accessories.