My First Event-
This following Saturday, October 16th, was my first event.
The event was held by the 808 social Coffee shop and Scentsy(a candle company) in downtown Peoria, Az. The event was held in the parking lot of the coffee shop and consisted of 18 small business vendors and 3 food vendors, Live music and pumpkin painting.
It was a very small event but I learned a lot of things from preparing and then working the event. I’m here to share all the details.
First, I prepped and gathered all the miscellaneous items I would need besides product.
Here is a document that shows all of them items, prices, and links.
Some tips for preparation:
-Get a card reader to accept cards. I had 50/50 Card and cash transactions.
-When ordering contactless and chip reader square it comes with an aux adaptor swipe reader, if you need the USB-C for iPhone you need to order one which is an additional $10.00 (I did not use mine on my first event though)
-Over estimate the amount of bread, strawberries, and brownies you will need (I almost ran out of strawberries, and it was a very small event.)
-Make sure to put your Pop-up tent up before the event to make sure you have everything and know how to work it.
-Do a test run on fitting everything in your vehicle, you may be surprised at how much you can fit!
I fit 2 tables, a pop up, 2 chairs, 16 cases of product, a small ice chest, 2 boxes of Misc items, and 2 trays of samples in my Toyota Camry with room to spare!
Now here is a list and explanation of the things I wish I would have brought to the event:
Tie downs and 2.5 gallon water Jugs- The day of the event it got windy, and of course when you have a pop up and on asphalt you can’t anchor it down. The most cost-efficient way to do this is with water jugs and ratchet straps to keep the tent weighed down. We ran out during the set-up time and bought some.
Sample stickers on the back of the bottles– This was concluded as we had to continue to look at the front of the bottles to see which one to pour for samples. This is just a quick thing to do that will save lots of time.
Trash bags and an additional trash can- You need large trash bags to dump your sample trash can into and then an additional trash can for behind your table to throw your trash away.
Adding labels to the end of the box- We put our cases under our table in the pattern of the way we had them set on the table. The entire time I had to pull a bottle and hope I grabbed the right flavor or move to the next case. Adding this would just make things much more efficient.
Brush for tablecloth- To remove crumbs
Led lights– To put on the tent so at night you have more reliable lighting
Shade for bottles/sidewalls- Our tent was facing East and the sun was going down in the west, the bottles were getting extremely hot. If we had a side wall or a shading from the side or something to put the bottles in to shade them, we could have avoided having to constantly move bottles or throwing them in the cooler.
Money Breakdown:
I did a total of $492.00 in sales.
$10.62 was deducted from square sales
$189.50 of product(Amount for each bottle sold)
$259.30 misc. costs (In linked spreadsheet above)
Equaling $32.53 in profit
When one time purchases of items such as the pop up, square,etc. tent are removed:
$136.12 in profit.
Meaning this same very small and slow market again would make me $136.12 in profit if I did the same exact volume again.
This was a very achievable and easy start up event, and I highly recommend doing a smaller market to get your footing.
Overall, this event was extremely slow (State Fair is in town) but I got great experience to share and implement at my next event!