Being a crafter and maker has afforded us a great way to interact with a lot of people and discuss our products and future endeavors; craft shows.  Few other business segments, outside of industry specific trade shows, really allow you to interact with so many people interested in your area of expertise.  

Craft shows require a lot of work to prepare for and was a market we delayed initially entering.  That was until the fall of 2021, we came  across  the MN Xmas Markets hosted by Fight for Something.  These were smaller pop-up type craft shows that were single day events.  We also liked that every vendor also committed to donating 7% of their sales to a local charity that fights for kids.  Also being only a one day show, it wouldn’t require as much time and resources to make all of the Christmas and Nature scenes for everyone to peruse and purchase at the show. We decided to participate in the pop-up market that was being held in Rochester, Mn.

Being our first foray into the craft show space we decided on a single size booth that we stocked full of with Christmas ornaments, Countdowns, Nativities, and our ever popular Nature Scenes.

We chose, along with some of our fellow vendors to setup the night before.  Being new to the craft show scene we still have some work to do on speeding up our setup and tear down speeds.  Preparing the day prior allowed us to enjoy the set up process instead of feeling rushed and in a time crunch as the doors were opening and eager shoppers were starting to make their rounds.

 We decided to employ the Square Reader for magstripe phone attachment.  This allowed us to also accept credit cards.  It was definitely a good choice to accept credit cards especially with fewer and fewer people carrying large sums of cash out and about.  It was nice being able to accept credit cards, but the reader didn’t provide the optimal customer experience, it required passing our connected phone back and forth and oftentimes scanning the credit card multiple times to get a good read. Overall, we’re happy with the Square Reader experience, as a starting point it’s very good, allowing us to offer more payment options to our customers until we can upgrade into one of their other offerings.

Truly the best part of the show was discussing our products and interacting with each person that stopped by our booth to check out our products.  It was a wonderful experience hearing how one of your designs and hand crafted products triggered a memory from someone's childhood when they were traveling with family and remembered a scene that was recreated in wood.  They can now have it forever remembered on their wall at home.