Falkland Midsummer Festival

You may have already seen on our social media that myself and David are involved in the Falkland Festival this year. We decided to join the committee after seeing a plea for new members to save the festival earlier in the year. Neither of us has been to the festival before but it would have been such a shame to see something that's been running for years end for lack of support. 

The festival is a week of events and family fun running from 14th - 21st June. This year things will be a bit different as the committee is mostly made up of new members. We're trying to refresh the event's image so I've been responsible for the rebrand and website design. I'm also going to be writing some posts on the festival blog and helping run the social media accounts. Finally, we have given it a new name: the Falkland Midsummer Festival.

We're meeting regularly at the moment as we try to get to grips with confirming the programme. There's a lot to learn about with everything involved in making the festival happen and hopefully a big success. It looks like we'll need quite a bit of help during the events, so if you're nearby we're looking for volunteers. There's also still time to apply for a stall at the street fair and we're currently looking for raffle donations. Let me know if you'd like to get involved in any way!

In the Studio: Planning for Events

Hey guys, I thought I should focus this blog on events as it's the time of year where everything gets a bit crazy. With all the fairs and markets you need to have an eye-catching stall to get noticed. We've had lots of displays over the years but this is our favourite with lots of props and height, soft colours and branded details including a custom printed table cloth from Print Me Pretty. We also decided that we should get a card machine as lots of people used to ask if we took card. We use iZettle which customers seem to love, the ipad app for it is great too. You just need to make sure the venue has wifi (or signal for phone internet as you can get the app on there too!)

Our top tips for fairs are:

• Make the most of your space, try Pinterest for stall ideas and be creative. 
• Make sure everything is clearly priced - people don't always like to ask.
• Bring along lots of business cards (we get ours from printed.com you can get 20% off with our link here) and other promotional freebies - we give out a different discount code for the website at each event so we can track if customers become online buyers. Logo badges and sweets are always popular too!
• Make a check list so you don't forget anything important. You can see ours below.
• Smile! Don't be afraid to chat to customers about your goodies, most people love to hear about your ideas and how you make things. That's what makes you different to the big shops!

Jilly made an events checklist which we thought you might like to see, it's designed for us though so not relevant to everyone but it might help if you're making your own. We tend to visualise the stall from base to signage in the order we set up when packing so that's why it's split into sections like this. Of course this list doesn't have stock in it but that's because it often changes!

Hopefully this has been helpful for anyone starting out with fairs. Thanks for reading and see you next week.