Fuzzy Turns

I am not going to beat around the bush here: commercially this was a failure. If I add up all the sales and deduct the money I owe to Phil Stevenson, then add up all the direct expenses (stall fee, van hire, fuel, accommodation), I am about £250 short. This could have been less had we decided to camp on site, but I would still be short. And that doesn’t even take into account indirect expenses (building the stall, and buying all the stuff that goes with it, such as paper bags and tissue, card payment device, business cards, leaflets, banner, etc.). Even further removed would be to take into consideration things such as money paid for any of the wood I used or the metal cups that go into the candlesticks, stains and dyes, lacquer, wax and what not else to actually make any of the stuff we sold. And let’s not even think about amortisation of my workshop and all the tools.

The only saving grace on that account is the fact that everybody else around us had exactly the same problem. Out of about 20 traders in the tent there were maybe 4 or 5 who covered their expenses and maybe made a bit of profit. This doesn’t bode well for future RCA presence at horse events. At least not this one. Why would anybody come back for more?

Having said all this, there are other perspectives to be had.

We always considered this event first and foremost a tester. A toe in the water. A small event to figure out whether the stall actually works. Whether I can actually get the money I want for my work. And on these levels, it worked beautifully.

The stand was erected in little time. Yes, there are a few small improvements, but overall this was easy peasy. It looked good, too, and we had loads of compliments from the other traders around us, and from (prospective) customers as well. The lights worked well, although I think I need to more lights behind the banner beaming backwards to add more sparkle.

The product selection worked. There was something there for everybody. The layout worked. The pieces in the centre did the attention grabbing they were meant to do. The prices worked: nobody tried to haggle, not even once. If anything, I think they should be higher. In reality I should sell at retail prices, i.e. cost plus 100% markup at least. We’ll try that out at the next event.

The banner worked beautifully. It really stood out and was visible from all the entrances into the tent. The whole stall said: Come and look at me, I am beautiful and you will like me.

The teamwork with Helen and Michael also worked well. If push comes to shove, I can probably do a show on my own, but it is definitely easier with two people on the stall.

And then there was the “mini holiday” effect. Whole family together for a whole weekend, nice weather, not much hard work, everybody had a bit of fun. Doesn’t happen too often nowadays, with Michael basically having moved out, Helen spending a lot of her weekends riding and me spending most weekends in the workshop.

So I reckon, overall it was a success. Not financially, but then, you can’t buy happiness. It’s priceless.

So now we are on Sunday. Spirits were still good, since we all had always promised ourselves to see this as a mini holiday rather than a serious “must sell” event. We packed all our stuff from the rooms, loaded the cars, dropped Michael’s car at a parking lot outside the estate and arrived again well in time before the RCA tent even opened.

Obviously our expectations in terms of sales were dampened, and the start to the day was indeed slow. However, it did pick up considerably, and in the end Sunday was a good day. In fact, had all three days had the same turnover as Sunday, we would have walked away with a small profit. There were even some people who poked their heads in in the morning, said they’d come back in the afternoon, and they did. We sold the last item, a pair of candlesticks for £35, just before we started packing up all our goods. Last minute, sort of. No discount, though (can’t afford that).

We also had some surprise visitors. At around 11:00, Helen’s cousin Jane popped in to pay us a visit. She runs her own business with flower arrangements, mostly for weddings and birthdays, and therefore has a good appreciation for what goes into running a small business and preparing a trade stall. She even bought a bottle stopper as a present for her dad. We always suspected she might pay us a visit, but it was still nice to see her.

And then an even bigger surprise. Another of Helen’s cousins, John, and his wife Rachel, appeared in the tent. They were completely unexpected, and John admitted that if it wasn’t for the fine weather and the fact that they live just round the corner, they wouldn’t have come. They didn’t even know we had a stall there (I don’t promote my business amongst the family, it either works with the general public or it doesn’t). And they also bought some small items.

And then we had a guy who bought my red monkeypuzzle bowl. He was so taken in by the various bowls, his wife had to almost physically restrain him from buying more than one. Not that we would have minded.

Customers are a funny lot. They come in all shades, ages, genders (we even had a gay couple), you name it. That goes to show that the fascination with wood goes across all boundaries, age groups, education. Most people like the material, and want to touch it, feel the grain. I just have to figure out what to put in front of them, so that they cannot resist and buy it.

In the end, we sold about a dozen items on Sunday, all across the range from £3.50 to £65. In the end we had even used the payment box a few times, and it worked smoothly. What a relief. Nobody ever haggled over the prices, but then some of the items were priced down from my usual level. Again, this is an area where I have to figure out what I can charge without scaring people off. If somebody is willing to spend £60 on a nice bowl, would they also spend £70 or £80?

Around 17:45 we started packing our stuff, and by 19:00 we were ready to leave. That was another success, being able to break down the stand and put it into the van completely in less than 90 minutes helps. The trip back home was largely uneventful, and that was Chatsworth done.

The next couple of posts will deal with things like: success or failure, being considerate or not, and other general ramblings. Oh, and lest I forget, I have now secured a stall at the Craft & Design Expirience in Henley-on-Thames, running from 24th of June to 26th of June. See you there!

On Saturday, we all got up in good time, and in good spirits, since everyone had reassured us that on this day sales were going to be much better than on Friday. The weather was with us, in fact it was marvellous. A slightly blustery, but sunny spring day, and Chatsworth estate showed itself from its most magnificent, almost magic side.

For those of you who have never been there, Chatsworth is the seat of the Duke of Devonshire. The house is located on the west side of a string of hills, to the east of which the proper high moors of Derbyshire begin. In front of the house is an extended (several miles long and about 1 mile wide) landscaped English garden, with big trees dotted all around, and sheep and cattle freely roaming around. A stream flows through the garden and on the other side another string of hills frames it all together. With spring blossom in full flow, and all the trees showing fresh greenery, blue and white skies above, and the flags of many a country flying around the various riding arenas, surrounded by white tents, it doesn’t take much imagination to feel yourself transported across the times. This is the quintessential English rural idyll.

Spectator numbers were certainly up from Friday, and we had much more visitors to our stall. Alas, no sales. More interesting conversations, more boredom, more of everything except sales. We managed to sell precisely one piece on Saturday.

On top of that, my neck was still playing up badly. I had more sessions lying down in the van, more pills and more cream applied to the neck. Eventually I figured out that the only that really helped was paracetamol, lots of it. It didn’t remove the stiffness in my neck, but at least it subdued the stabbing needles every time I moved my head ever so slightly.

Michael and Helen rearranged the items on the shelves several times, and we tried every trick in the book to get people to come in and have a closer look. It was no good. The stalls were kept open until 18:30, to catch even the last possible prospect. Again, we were not the only ones. All around us, everybody complained. Nigel from the RCA observed that this was a different crowd from last year. According to him, there are three different crowds you can get at horse events. The first sort are the town people. They hardly every buy anything, mostly because they expect things to be priced at Tesco level, and secondly because many of them simply don’t have any money to spend. The second sort of people are horsey people, i.e. people who have horses and look after them themselves. Again, they don’t buy much. They do appreciate the work and they don’t haggle over prices, but they haven’t got any money left once the horses are fed. And finally, the third lot are horsey people who have others looking after their horses. These are the ones that buy stuff, as they appreciate the value and they have the money.

Sadly, on Friday it was mostly horsey people and on Saturday almost exclusively town people. In consequence, bad business.

We finished the day with a nice meal at a restaurant just down the road from Riber Hall. If you ever get into this part of the world, The Royal Oak in Tansley has a good cuisine, moderate prices, excellent quality and service.

During Friday lunch at a motorway services, Helen had bought me some Ibuprofen, and on Thursday night I started taking them. Friday morning my neck felt bad already, and the tablets didn’t seem to have much effect. I resigned myself to having a bit of a stiff neck for the weekend. Not ideal, but not the end of the world.

We got up, had some coffee and made off to the show, about 10 miles away, and we needed to be there at around 08:30. No problem. We had been warned by the guys from the RCA that they expected Friday to be quiet. Well, it was quiet. There were sometimes passages of 5 or 10 minutes when not a single person walked across the front of our stall.

On the other hand, we made a lot of contact with the other stall holders, discussed the pros and cons of various stand layouts, were given plenty of advice on what to do and not to do, where to go and where to avoid, and so on. All in all, this is a nice community. People are friendly and helpful, as they all know that tomorrow they might have to ask for some help themselves.

We had a lot of positive feedback from the other people in the tent and also from those few spectators that came to see us. There were some woodturners (you can always spot them by the way they pick up your work and look at it. More often than not the first thing they do is turn it upside down and look at the bottom), and most of them seemed to be quite impressed. Goes down like honey, I tell you.

When we put up the stall on the day before, we had also brought a tin of paint for some last minute touch up jobs. These were duly applied and no more thought of. Then both of notice Jane and Sean polishing some of their handbags. We walk over, make some lighthearted comments, only to be greeted with some rather fiery looks, and we realized that we had accidentally showered their top shelf with little droplets of white paint. That was proper embarrassing, I can tell you. We apologized profusely, which they accepted, and after that we all got along fine. Another lesson learned.

As the day went on, nothing much happened. Some interest here, a little chat there. It took until about 2pm before we had our first sale: a walnut box. Then another few hours of chatting and waiting and chatting and waiting and…, well, you get the picture. Then, finally, around 4pm, I had a long chat with another stall holder from somewhere else on the grounds, and after about 20 minutes I thought “OK, any second now he’s gonna give us a nod and wish us a good day”. But he surprised me by pointing at my blue vase with an orange dot and said “Could I have that one, please?” Almost as if he had to ask permission to buy it.

That sort of saved the day, money wise. Not great, but at least not a total dead end.

All this time, my neck was getting worse and worse. At some point I lay down in the van, with some rolled up carpet under my neck to try and get some relief. By around 5pm I was in total agony. Any movement of the head resulted in immediate pain that wanted to make me scream (but that would have caused even more pain, so I didn’t). When the show was finished for the day, we went straight to the local supermarket and bought some proper paracetamol and some gel. I then had a long hot bath (and as it later turned out, that was completely the wrong thing to do), popped in a few pills and put some gel on. In that way I could at least enjoy some dinner. By that time, my stepson Michael had arrived as well, promising much desired relief for the next 2 days. But more about that in the next post.

My wife Helen and myself spent, as the studious reader of this site will already know, the last 4 days at Chatsworth in Derbyshire running a trade stall at their annual horse trials. We are now back at home, and as you can imagine, there was lots to be seen and learned and to be written about.

Worry not, you shall hear it all. There will be a veritable feast of information coming your way if you can be a little patient (I can’t spend all day writing, I’ve got some work to do as well).

So where to start? Well, let’s start here: official, undeniable and irrefutable proof that we were there:

I suppose the correct place to start is at the beginning of the trip. So I’ll restrict this post to day 1, Thursday. We got up at around 07:00, and I must have slept a little odd, because I had a bit of a crick in my neck. You know, when you either had too many pillows or not enough, that sort of thing. In any case, we got our stuff together at home (tools and various bits and pieces) drove to the yard where Helen keeps her horses (and I now keep my stall and all my merchandise), picked up the keys for the van and started loading.

It turned out that the only van that was available from Nick was a 3.5t box van. Let me tell you, even with all our stuff inside, it looked positively empty. Oodles of space. More about that later. So off we go. Add some fuel to the tank and then a stop in Halesowen at Colourcubed to pick up the business cards, leaflets and banner. And then we hit the road towards Chatsworth. This all went swimmingly until we left the A38 at Alfreton. By that time, Helen was driving because my neck was starting to give me some serious grief.

Now, instead of instructing my map app to find the easiest route, it was showing me the shortest route. Well, well, well. We lost our way several times, with all those windy roads and me not being able to turn my head very well. Just as well that we set out early.

We finally arrived on the showgrounds around 15:00, which turned out to be a blessing, because I had received an SMS from the RCA telling me not to come before 14:00, as they had to put some extra flooring into the tent after the heavy rains of the previous two days.

We had a 3m x 2.5m stall, in between Jane and Sean from Norwich selling leather handbags and Kathy and Colin selling Baavets (duvets and pillows from pure wool). There were about 20 traders in the RCA tent, and only the guys opposite Kathy and Colin had some wood items for sale, together with their crockery, all made in Tunisia. This was actually the slightly disappointing thing about the RCA tent: only about half of the stalls were occupied by actual makers of items, the rest were all just traders.

We could get the van quite close to the stall (another blessing), and erection of the stall went smoothly, except for a few things we need to just consider next time. Firstly, the corner braces are not 90 degrees, they are slightly overbent, therefore widening the U-shape of the stall. Something I will need to address before the next show. Secondly, and that was a little surprise, the panels, when screwed together, also showed quite a bend in the front. A little inspection showed that the minutest overhang of the plywood boards against the pine frames caused this. In the end, we only used two screws per panel instead of three, and loosened them all a little bit and it all went perfectly fine. Here’s a picture.

I am really happy with this stand. It looks almost like a small portable gallery, just what I wanted. The banner on top works well, and although it is a bit shouty, I am not ashamed of it. We faffed around quite a bit with all the items to find the optimum display, but in the end the stall worked very well.

Once this was all set up, around 19:00, we made our way to our overnight accommodation. Helen had booked us a room through Derbyshire Country Houses at Riber Hall. This is part of a small village right behind Riber Castle, on top of a mountain (OK, large hill) overlooking Matlock and the gorge. The room was on the top floor of a converted hay barn, and let me tell you, it was absolutely adorable. It had a four poster bed, some beautiful old furniture, a small kitchenette (self-catering!) and an en-suite bathroom. And an excellent view over the countryside.

By this time, I was in pain. I had been sweating heavily during the setup, the sun was out, and at the same time a strong, gusty wind blew, which would not have helped with the muscle spasm in my neck. So I had myself a really nice hot bath, and we got some dinner from the Wetherspoon in Matlock, pretty much the only choice at that time of the night. And then off to bed, after all it was an early start the next morning. Little did I know what was lying ahead…