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Art + Audience
Ep. 19: Behind the Booth: Lessons from the Atlanta Trade Show
00:14:21
In this special episode, Stacie records live from the bustling Atlanta Market alongside her team members Amanda and Jessica. They share behind-the-scenes insights into preparing for a wholesale trade show, the highs and lows of the event, and what it...
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- [00:00]
Stacey Bloomfield
Hey there, artists and creatives. Do you have burning questions about growing your art business, building your audience, selling your products, or navigating this creative life? Well, now you can call in and ask me directly. We've set up a dedicated Art plus audience podcast hotline just for you. Simply call 479-966-9561, leave your question and I'll be answering select questions on future episodes.
- [00:29]
Amanda
So.
- [00:30]
Stacey Bloomfield
So whether you're curious about marketing your art, building your brand, licensing, your portfolio, or anything in between, I'd love to hear from you. That number again is 479-966-9561. I can't wait to hear what you're wondering about and dive into these topics on the show. Let's make this a conversation. Bye.
- [00:53]
Amanda
It looks really pretty afterwards, but we went through a heck of a lot of problems getting set up because there's always things you don't expect. You can plan for months like we did and still have hiccups.
- [01:02]
Jessica Hobbs
Everything that could go wrong, really, truthfully went wrong to the point of our IKEA order getting canceled the day we were supposed to pick it up out of nowhere to. We only had one wall set up we couldn't nail into or screw into. So our whole design that we had planned was supposed to be three curtain rods that were hanging all of our tea towels. We only got one adhered to. It was thing after thing after thing. We had to pivot so many times.
- [01:23]
Amanda
Wouldn't it be nice if your art.
- [01:25]
Stacey Bloomfield
Business loved you back? Hi, I'm Stacey Bloomfield. After years of trial and error and late night doodling, I went from being a coffee shop manager to running a vibrant seven figure art business that I love. And now I'm on a mission to help more artists create an art business that they love too. So I invite you to find a cozy spot, pull out your favorite sketchbook, and listen in. It's never too late to chase your creative dreams. Welcome to the Art plus audience podcast. Hi, everybody.
- [01:55]
Amanda
It's Stacy Bloomfield. I'm here with Amanda. Say hi.
- [01:58]
Jessica Hobbs
Hello. Lovely to meet you all.
- [02:01]
Amanda
So we're recording this podcast episode from the back of our booth. We're in Atlanta. I don't have all my regular equipment, so we're talking into an extra phone so you can hear this audio. Fingers crossed. But, Amanda, I wanted you to talk to everybody about what it takes to pull off a wholesale trade show. So tell them where we're at and what we're doing.
- [02:18]
Jessica Hobbs
Well, today is Friday. Friday, yes. So we're on day three of Market. And it has been months of preparation, starting from marketing materials to, you know, what kind of catalog do we want to. How many postcards are we going to send out? Who are the recipients, how many are going to be pitching to versus repeat customers. And it has been months of planning, and we figured out a way to make it work. And I think it ended up. Do you want to talk budget at all?
- [02:42]
Amanda
Yeah, just a second. For some of you who may be listening, and you are artists, but you're not really familiar with what pat happens at these trade shows. This is like a wholesale trade show. Atlanta does it twice a year. They do one in January and one in the summer. There's trade shows all over the world, all over the country, but Atlanta in January is like the place to be. We brought gingerbread products here, but we've also met a bunch of licensing contacts, too. And it's like a reunion to meet all sorts of people you've known for many, many years. But it's hard to pull off. I used to do these shows by myself, and then my sister helped me. And this year I had a team, Amanda and Jessica, who you'll meet in a minute, who made this happen. So why don't you talk a little bit about the money of it all? Because it's not inexpensive to do this. It's an investment. It's an investment in terms of, like, advertising. Like, that's what I think of it as, like, marketing. But it's an investment of time, money for samples. So I'm going to have Amanda quickly run through budget for you.
- [03:34]
Jessica Hobbs
Like Stacy said, it is not an inexpensive trip. So not only do you have airfare if you're going to be doing Uber travels or your car travels, but then you also have the hotel or Airbnb that you're staying at. The booth itself was think around 3 to $4,000. That's something that comes with no walls. So then walls. Each wall runs about $600 a piece for the hard walls to be able to hang. Then you have all the things you need to buy from Ikea or wherever you're going to have the furniture at. So it's how you're going to display the items that you kind of prepare for. All in all, it's going to be anywhere between 10 to $15,000 for us to do this show.
- [04:06]
Amanda
And how many square feet is our booth? 100.
- [04:08]
Jessica Hobbs
It's 100. 100 square feet. And we did get three overhead lights as well, which are not inexpensive. We also got flooring as well. So the booth basically comes naked. It comes. And then you get to dress it up however you want to dress it up. Thankfully, the walls did come painted, but then we come and we bring, like I said, we bring the, like, butcher block table that we had. We bring chairs, step ladders, extension cords, all the things, all the things that you could need.
- [04:33]
Amanda
So I will show you all some footage of the front. You can check this out on YouTube. I'll give you, like, a full tour of the booth. But for the podcast episode, I really want to talk about, like, the meat and potatoes of putting this together, because that's been the biggest question. I also would love for you to share a little bit because it looks really pretty afterwards, but we went through a heck of a lot of problems getting set up because there's always things you don't expect. You can plan for months like we did and still have hiccups. So you had a list of things that went wrong?
- [05:01]
Jessica Hobbs
Yes.
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Amanda
Why don't you just summarize a few things that went wrong during setup? Because I'll just say first, I was supposed to fly up to help them set up, and I got really sick and I couldn't fly, so I had to delay my flight by two days, and these poor girls had to deal with so much. So I'm going to hand it right back.
- [05:15]
Jessica Hobbs
It really started off the night we went to Chipotle, and Chipotle was out of every cheese. Everything. Everything. We should have known by then. But no, everything that could go wrong, really, truthfully went wrong to the point of our IKEA order getting canceled the day we were supposed to pick it up out of nowhere to. We only had one wall set up the day of setup to. Our Airbnb had a gas leak and we had to switch to a hotel to our car rental car, not being able to unlock. So now we had to shift from being able to go and drive ourselves everywhere and pack, you know, all of our things to now Ubering, literally everywhere, because our Airbnb wasn't walking distance. So all of that happened to, you know, we had food delivered and there was no utensils. So we're eating primally with our hands. Yeah, exactly. I'm trying to think, oh, the walls that we got, we couldn't nail into or screw into. So our whole design that we had planned was supposed to be three curtain rods that were hanging all of our tea towels. We only got one adhered to. We try. I mean, I think I. I broke four nails trying to hammer it in. And I'm Not. I'm not a weak girl, you know, I can. I can. I can hammer things. So it just was. It was thing after thing after thing. I'm trying to think if there's anything other major. But we had to pivot so many times. Thankfully, there is an IKEA in Atlanta. And what we were able to do is we were able to walk IKEA and get ideas of what would work, knowing that we might not have walls. You know, we came in here, okay, there's two walls that are missing that we were meant to hang things on. How can we pivot this if they can't get the wall set up? So it's been a lot of sweet talking. It's been a lot of meeting everyone down at the docks and everywhere. Everywhere else. And, yeah, I think that's all the major, major hiccups.
- [06:45]
Amanda
I mean, there's probably more if we were to really dig into it. But the truth is, they got through it. They were here at the convention center till, what, 11.
- [06:53]
Jessica Hobbs
It was 11:30.
- [06:54]
Amanda
11:30 at night, I mean, which is way later than you're supposed to be. And then they had to be back here, like, what, 8am the next day? 8am to finish setting up, because I came rolling in with my big mama jama suitcase. It's enormous, guys. And I brought all these samples because. Oh, that's another thing. Some samples didn't show up on time that we shipped here. And then something else who ordered from Amazon arrived late. And then another thing from Amazon arrived ripped open as a stapler. It was just a stapler, but a stapler. Someone took our stapler. So you have that kind of energy going into a show, and you just hope you're like, okay, all this stuff happened. I believe that something really good is going to have happen in the show. It could be one good conversation. It could be a buyer you didn't expect. It could be a relationship that you're starting to build. Talk about this all the time. There's people I've met at shows that years later, we work with for licensing, all sorts of opportunities. So people who go to shows, you need to, like, think of it as leveraging every opportunity. I have a little brand book in here in case there's licensing opportunities that we can hand out. We brought extra product just to put out and see if people responded to it. And then as soon as, like, we put it out, people are like, yes, I like this. So you can test ideas.
- [07:56]
Jessica Hobbs
You.
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Amanda
And it's. I think the main thing is people want to touch the product yes, People want to touch it.
- [08:01]
Jessica Hobbs
They want a tactile experience.
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Amanda
They do, because selling online is so limiting. And so there's all these clients that we're getting to find who shop the shows and not just online at Fair Market. So it's a huge opportunity for us. And also, we don't get to see each other as a team very often because everyone's pretty much remote, right?
- [08:17]
Jessica Hobbs
Yeah, exactly. And I will say that for our customers, I think it's been really important to be able to touch and feel products, especially our new products, that are maybe a little bit of a higher price point than what our audience is used to. So our table runners are cloth napkins. People have responded really, really well to them because they're able to touch and feel the quality and see them in person versus just seeing them virtually. Like, you just never know what you're going to get online. And so it's been really helpful for people to be able to touch and feel them.
- [08:40]
Amanda
Last thing I'll say before I'm going to tap Amanda out, we're going to tap Jessica in, who helps with all of us, too. And she does like manufacturing with us and licensing is. I haven't been able to go to a show since 2020, and it was really remarkable how many people, like, know the Gingerbread brand now, because, I mean, yeah, we're 15 years old, but, I mean, five years is a long time to grow. We've grown a lot in five years. And there's people walking by and they're.
- [09:05]
Jessica Hobbs
Like, oh, I love your towels, I.
- [09:07]
Amanda
Love your designs, I love your Instagram. People hugging us, people hugging my team. And I miss that feeling because we don't get that much anymore because everyone's chronically online. But all that is to say is it's a real treat. And we're trying to figure out if we're going to keep doing more shows, right?
- [09:23]
Jessica Hobbs
Yeah. Yeah. It's been super invigorating to get to meet all these people that I have been messaging on Fair or directly of getting to actually meet them in person or, you know, creative face with the people that you're getting to be with. And people just love Stacy. They come to me, they come to see her. Oh, gosh.
- [09:39]
Amanda
Well, that's really kind. I'm going to switch it over to Jessica, so thank you so much. Amanda. Stacy. Hi. So I'm here with Jessica Hobbs. Hi, Jessica. Hello, Jessica. It's pretty great because Jessica works with Gingerbread with product development and helping with collaborations and licensing, but I've known Jessica for a few years through the Creative Powerhouse Society, which is a membership I run. But Jessica is been with us for what, a year? Yeah, a year. Year and a half. Year and a half, yeah. So, Jessica, why don't you tell everyone a little bit about your involvement with market and prep and product development for the show.
- [10:10]
Jessica Hobbs
Sure. So I have been doing markets for quite a few years from both the buyer side and the exhibitor side. So walking around and shopping, looking for products for brands, but also setting up showrooms, merchandising the items, planning out where we're going to put things, all that goes into the back end, which, as we have learned here, there's a lot of little details to manage. So, yeah, I was happy to help with the gingerbread booth that we were doing. We are in the temporaries, so that was also a different experience than what I've done before in showrooms, so. So, yeah, we've had a blast with it.
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Amanda
Yeah. So our best selling products are tea towels, but we are trying to expand into more kitchen and homewares. Right? Yes. So can you tell a little bit about what our strategy has been going into, like the new products that are debuting here for us?
- [10:57]
Jessica Hobbs
Yes. So, as Stacy said, our tea towels being our best selling product. So of course we're looking at what's working in tea towels, where we feel like we need to add more skus then as we want to expand into tabletop and if we are in the tabletop area of market. So we definitely wanted to capitalize on that. So we introduced runners and we picked some styles that coordinate well but also offer our customers some different designs. So, you know, birds are very popular with our audience. So we wanted to have a bird. We love a butterfly, so we have a butterfly style. So we picked something that's going to appeal to different shops, but they still merchandise very well together. And, you know, there are always things that maybe don't make the cut. So we start with, you know, five or six different styles and then narrow that down as we get samples and determine, you know, what's going to be the best fit for our audience. So we started with runners and then we also have flour sack napkins. And that is something we know. Our, our audience loves the flour sack tea towels. So we brought that same fabric over to the napkins and thought about how can we make this different than the tea towels, but still something that a store will want to purchase as well.
- [12:05]
Amanda
And.
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Jessica Hobbs
And then we thought about fabrics too. So a table runner, you don't want wrinkles in it, you want it to look nice on your table. So we went with a thicker fabric, cotton. So those are just some of the considerations as we were developing the product for market.
- [12:18]
Amanda
Yeah. And what's interesting is we're in a transitional phase, and I think every business that's been around for a while, you're going to have years where, like, your best sellers are one thing. And it's not so much that trends change, but buyers interest changes because it's their job to keep their customers, like, engaged. And so we want to keep our buyers engaged. So we're never deviating from, like, what our core is at Gingerbread. But when you go to market like this and you see other booths and you see what's trending in other areas, like, right now, I'm seeing so much nautical, and I'm seeing so much like, blue herons. And we're thinking like, well, it doesn't make sense for Gingerbread to expand maybe in the future into some other design categories aside from just floral still, maybe in our color palette, but, like, do it the gingerbread way. And so you walk these shows not just, like, to meet people and hopefully get purchase orders, but to stay, like, engaged with what's happening. Because if you're online, you're really only seeing, like, little bit of what's happening, right? Yeah.
- [13:10]
Jessica Hobbs
That's one of the highlights from this show is the customers that we've worked with, whether they've placed an order or they haven't yet. They've had so much great feedback for us, and they will let you know what they're looking for. So we've loved that because that's. We've had a lot of requests for nautical. So not only are we seeing that, but then they'll ask for, you know, a nautical theme tea towel or a specific flower. We've had a lot of garden centers come, and they're looking for specific flowers or colors.
- [13:38]
Amanda
Peppers. Someone has a Tabasco business or something, a hot sauce. So they're like, you do peppers? We're like, maybe someday.
- [13:43]
Jessica Hobbs
And this will definitely guide a lot of our product development considerations. So it's something that we're going to be meeting on when we get back into the studio and just talk about if those are things that we want to add to the line, and we see that being a fit for our collection.
- [13:57]
Amanda
Yep. So now that it's just a matter of finishing up market and then deciding which market we want to do next, right?
- [14:03]
Jessica Hobbs
Yes.
- [14:04]
Yeah.
- [14:05]
Amanda
Well, anything else you want to say? No.
- [14:07]
Jessica Hobbs
I mean, right now we're going to go back and just make sure that we have a meeting talking about how this went, things that we can do differently for next time, things that worked for this time. And we're already starting our planning for another one. So we're excited to keep keep doing these shows.
- [14:23]
Amanda
I really want to keep doing them. I have a lot of fun. Well, Jessica, thank you so much for taking a few minutes. I know you got to get back to the booth, so I'll see you later. Thank you. And that's it for this little mini what do you want to call this Atlanta Market podcast episode. I hope that it was informative and feel free to email us or drop a comment underneath the blog post with the show notes with any questions you have. Bye, everybody.
- [14:46]
Stacey Bloomfield
Thanks so much for tuning in. Hey, could you do me a favor? Could you subscribe to this podcast and then share it with one of your best art friends? I'd really appreciate it. And then head on over to Instagram and follow me at the leverage your art account and you can keep up with all of our future episodes. Thank you so much for your support. It means everything to have you here listening and learning.
- [15:09]
Jessica Hobbs
Bye.