The Board Chronicles: Summit Holiday Boutique

henrymowry

10 years ago

The Board Chronicles is an ongoing series of articles about the adventures of Mrs M’s Handmade as a vendor at community festivals & craft fairs. Mrs M’s subsidiary, Mr M’s Woodshop, has been approved to create this chronicle for the good of vendorkind.

The Summit is a development in Valencia with many gated neighborhoods; a friend produces a pair of holiday boutiques in the Summit’s clubhouse as a fundraiser for her designated charity, Bridge to Home. That charity funds efforts to help the homeless in Santa Clarita.

This event raised several hundred dollars for that charity. That’s worth something.

The event repeats in a month on December 19, with Santa Claus in attendance. Looking forward to it!

New Ideas

After so long doing outdoor events where you drive to your booth, it’s a real switch to prepare for indoor events with a folding wagon to haul product over sidewalks.
Splitting inventory to cover multiple events on the same day is a challenge. If you don’t actually count everything … you don’t know what you’ve got. That always leads to containers of products you don’t need, and containers of product at another event that you wish you had.

Observations

This event felt a bit like a home boutique: it appealed to a specific set of friends, and drew many people from the neighborhood.
There were about 20 vendors; a mix of handmade and buy & sell.
I did hear from one vendor that sales were down significantly from their appearance at last year’s event … it’s always a crap shoot, as one wise friend of mine likes to say.
More and more events, it seems, expect a raffle item contribution for them to extend their fundraising to selling raffle tickets. I need to start adding that expense to the actual cost of the events.
This is the 3rd event that we’ve been next to the door, and had less than spectacular results. This was a small event, but boards were next to the door, and I only sold one item from Mr M’s inventory. Superstitious? Getting there.
In the end, the event achieved my goals for the event. Expectations were met, and funds were raised for a deserving charity. Win, win.