Honk if you're Hectic

The last few weeks have been hectic. The weekend of the 15th of September saw us head down to Londinium with our products in tow and a few rather shabby presentation boxes for Design Edge a southern version of the British Craft Trade Show which we attended earlier in the year.

The idea of the show is that a wide variety of British designed and British made products are brought together in one location and then hoards of lovely buyers come from near and far to place their Christmas orders for shops, galleries and museums.

Armed with an eight disc audio book and a brand new satellite navigation system we made the long journey down to Sandown Race course in pretty good spirits and made good time. Saturday afternoon was spent arranging our hastily printed promotional materials and gawping at other much more professionally dressed stands before a frantic late night search for a calculator* and a disturbed night at the local Holiday Inn.**

The three day fair was a mixed bag. The number of exhibitors was apparently vastly reduced from the previous year (this was only its second year) and it seemed as though days could pass without you seeing a buyer. Tumbleweed rolled through the stands, exhibitors drank endless cups of tea bought from a tyrant in a tabard*** and yet despite all this we came away with some really good orders.

Trade fairs like this one are really a necessity for our business to be a business. Without them it would be a real uphill struggle to gain new customers and promote ourselves to shops and galleries. But stands cost upwards of £300 pounds with essential lighting on top of that, not including the cost of transport, accommodation and food (which over three nights just outside of London can mount up)

For a new creative business it is a big gamble embarking on your first trade fair and when all the costs are factored in it can be a very demoralizing experience even if you do take some good orders. Creative businesses take time to develop, to grow, often organically into something that can be profitable. If there is no support for these home-grown creative-driven businesses the chances of failure are pretty high.

ENTER STAGE LEFT: The Aurora Project

…this blog is to be continued!

*Buyers place orders at the fair and on the spot calculations bring me out in a cold sweat.
**The hotel was itself very lovely but the onslaught of a cold coupled with my vivid imagination meant that I awoke violently in the middle of the night shouting 'There's a man in the room!'
***Three cups of tea cost three different amounts on various trips to the cafeteria and my acknowledgement that I had used two cups one on top of the other to prevent scalding was greeted with a withering stare and firm instructions to 'only use one cup, only one cup for tea next time.'

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