market lessons learnt

Still feel like I’ve got first-market-hangover, but slowly getting over it. I’ve learnt lots from this first market..... the main one being how hard it is to sell your own work!

It’s actually quite horrible - and I’d much rather hide behind an on-line shop than face people. I’m just no good at selling my own work – and say all the wrong things! It’s really hard to try and make small-talk and inform people about the process without it sounding like a sales pitch – so very often I said nothing.

When I sold one of my new wall-plates I panicked and then didn’t wrap it properly, had the wrong size bag and after the customer left I felt awful that I made such a mess of it! One of the good things of selling on-line is you can be ‘hidden’ from the selling process and almost separate yourself from it. You can take the time to make sure everything is packaged correctly and looks nice - which is really important to me, but at the market I felt under pressure and realised I had no space to easily wrap and package the goods apart from the floor!

The pricing of my products has a big impact on sales and I think even though it is a market selling all hand-made / designed products there is still an expectation that these will be at fairly cheap prices. When you sell through a retailer (as I am) you need to make sure your prices are consistent with their selling price (you can’t undercut them) and so it does make the pricing very difficult to tailor to a market.

Ho-hum. It was a good learning process for me anyway – and I hope that things can only get better for next time!