What sold at the show.

[amyk]

These are the ones that sold at the show and what they paid for them. So you can get an idea of the market today. Saturday was windy. Gusts up to 40 MPH. kept blowing my displays over.

This was my first sale for $85.00. The only wrap that sold on Saturday.


Sunday was extremely windy. gusts up to 60 MPH. and a lot of them. My tent and displays were fairly secure although I gave up on the tent around 3 oclock and took the top down. I had brought a bunch of my reject rocks from the rock pile to hold my displays down. It worked very well.

A cute little girl wanted something but her mom didn't want to spend much for a child. So i sold her this one for $10.00


I made a custom piece Sat nite for a guy who brought me a red rock (sandstone) that he climbed up to the top of bell rock to get. He wanted me to cab/wrap it in copper with a vortex type swirl on it. I did not get a photo of it however. I thought it was a good wrap on a horrible stone. The stone was very fragile and I dared not work it too much. It wasn't very big anyway. He loved it and I even saw him wearing it the next day. I charged him $25.00 as it only took me 45 minutes to cab and wrap it in copper.

Monday was a bit better for sales. I needed to move something. So I put up a sign announcing a 20% off sale for memorial day. I had raised all the prices for the sale before hand just in case I had to do this.

This one sold for $52.00


This little one sold for $30.00



I sold these 2 together for $85.00.



Then at the end of the day as we were packing up I sold these 4 for $150.00. I gave them 25% off for them as I wanted 1 more sale, and it was the last chance. I made her buy 4 to get the 25% off.





This sold for $35.00


I also sold some other necklaces. T-shirts, post cards and mouse pads with images of my paintings on them,

All in All I took in $650.00 and my booth cost me $165.00 for 3 days. So I made about $500 profit minus my materials.

Not as good as I had hoped but not too shabby either. Considering the really windy weather.

I hope this gives you some idea of what is out there for us, sales wise.

Amy

[Toad]

Great job, and good information.

[NDK]

Thanks for being so honest with your sales #'s Amy. Sounds like a tough 3 days, but a little profit to show for it.

Nate

[adrian65]

All of your sales are beautiful, but that Montana takes the cake. Perfectly wrapped and very inspired match between the colors of the beads and of the cab. No wonder it went away the first one, and at a good price.

Adrian

[drocknut]

Congratulations Amy, sounds like a profitable weekend to me. I think as far as prices it just depends on the area as to what people are willing to pay for a piece (usually far below what it's worth and the materials/time put in to make it). Good for you for getting at least a little money above the booth fee.

[lisatech]

Thank you for sharing. Lovely work in your pics.

I may have missed it in a earlier post but what kind of show was it? Arts & Craft, Hobby, Lapidary?

[frane]

You have some beautiful wraps there! I can see why they went!
Over all, I think it was a good result for the way the economy is. Still, not much for 3 days but if you had fun, that is what counts at these events.
Fran

[Donnie's Rocky Treasures]

That is excellent, Amy! Glad it went as well as it did for you!

[Roger]

Sounds like you did ok,your wraps are a steal at those price's.

Roger

[peachfront]

WOW! I appreciate the frank discussion. Prices and expected sales have truly cratered since 1989. I was already seeing a lot of this in the mid 1990s, when I decided to stop doing shows. I figured these things go in cycles, but I guess the price of tulips never came back and maybe the price of stone/wire wraps won't either in real dollars.

It's a long ways away from the days in 1989 when people would set up a $25 booth and make $800 for basic bell caps and cheesy wraps with round wire. Of course, that was the height of the crystal craze but still.

Who thought prices would stay this depressed for this long?

You do great work, so I don't think it's about the work. I think it's about how the price of our stone and our work has cratered over the last 20 years.

I pull out my old Lapidary Journals and see what the price of rough was in 1990 and then I look around here (and elsewhere on the internet) and see what it's priced today, and I wish I had sold it all back then except for what I wanted for myself. I thought I was too busy, sigh...I did sell all my wire wraps, glad of that. They wouldn't be worth a dime in today's competitive market.

[Fossilman]

Nice wraps..........

[christopherl1234]

Looks like you did alright. Your results would definitely motivate me to do more shows.

[johnjsgems]

You do great work, for sure. I do too many shows and only thing for certain is you can't count on doing the same at any other show. I used to joke there was no point taking something to the next show since it sold well at last show. Seems like whatever sold really well was a dud at next show. With only jewelry to sell I would say add some lower price, easy to make items. The high dollar, really nice things appeal to many but buyers are few. A lot of low price sales add up pretty fast and help to cover expenses. You should look into juried arts/crafts shows also. You would have customers expecting handcrafted items of quality and not compete with vendors peddling imported crap.

[Roller]

Thanks ! lol at "I made her buy 4 to get the 25% off!!!!"""" thats a good saleswoman !!! your hired !

[amyk]

Yes, lisatech it was an arts and cafts show. By the way everyone, all the wraps I sold were originally priced a bit higher than they actually sold for. I think at a show like this you have to price them with a little haggling room. I raised all my prices on them before the show so I could haggle and not go home crying.

I also do have some simpler and cheaper wraps as well as the lavish and expensive ones. It was wierd though. There was one wrap that everyone was looking at on Saturday and no one looked at it at all on Sunday. Strange how one day can be so different from the next. Everyone looked at it on Saturday but no one bought it. It was a cheap one too.

[beefjello]

Good job Amy, both with the wraps and sales. The Montana wrap is especially beautiful. I think it's a good feeling to know people are out there wearing and showing off things you created yourself

[peachfront]

I'll offer one more comment. You say you raised your prices before the show so that you could haggle. That's one way to do it, and one of my mentors always did it that way. However, there's a problem with the strategy, mainly that you miss sales from people who don't "haggle" and you attract a "haggling" energy to your booth. Another way, which I copied from some other friends who always did well selling EXPENSIVE items, was simply to price the items fairly to begin with. Then, ONLY offer the discount if the buyer purchases multiple items.

In this way, you open yourself up to making sales to people who will not/do not haggle, and you also don't have that awkward situation come up where two people are shopping, and then one of them overhears you offer a different price to the other person.

For some people, if you have a good "sales" personality, and you like to haggle, it's OK to work your strategy. It's profitable for some people. For me, it was an absolutely TERRIBLE strategy. And why wouldn't it be? I'm not that kind of person who haggles when I buy, and I don't even LIKE that kind of person, I don't want to deal with them. Instead, if an item is priced too high, I figure the seller is already haggling, and I just walk away. There are other people like me out there who are "no hassle, no haggle" type people. I'd rather sell to them. Leave the drama and the discussion to somebody else.

If I'm selling one or two items, then I don't want an argument or a haggle or a discussion. Of course, I am always willing to offer a discount to the person who is helping me out by purchasing multiple items.

I would suggest you try it both ways and see what works for your personality. It sounds like a lot of people just looked and walked away. You would be surprised at how many people just HATE having a "used car salesman" trying to sell them jewelry. Yes, other people expect and even enjoy the haggle. It takes all kinds, I guess. You have to figure out who is more profitable to deal with, in the long run.

Just an idea that has worked for some of us out here in times gone by. My mentor who taught me to haggle ultimately went bust, while my friends who taught me "no haggle" prospered and retired to a nice vacation home. That was the 1990s, and maybe everybody in the 21st century likes a haggle, I dunno. I tend to doubt it. I think if you're chasing the hagglers, you're losing the easy, no hassle customer.

[amyk]

Thanks, peachfront. food for thought.

I did notice that when I did what my husband suggested which was to approach someone immediately when they started looking, 9 times out of ten they just walked away. The used car salesman routine that you mentioned and I hate also.

So when my husband wasn't around the next day, I just stayed in the back of the booth unless someone was looking for a long time, then I approached them with explanations of my work.
This seemed to keep more people looking longer. Whether it sold more pendants, I will never know. I like to believe it did.

[johnjsgems]

You hear comments from potential buyers about vendors sitting back too so you can't win. We sell my wife's beaded jewelry as well as tools/supplies. What seems to work best for us is to have all price tags visible so they don't have to ask, greet the customer promptly and tell them if they would like to see anything or try it on, we have a mirror. Then kind of back off and let them look. Most of her jewelry is in a display case. It is two tiered and she sometimes puts a few bracelets on the bottom section top. People will pick those up and try them on pretty freely. I personally hate it when jewelry is displayed without prices so you have to ask how much something is.

[Tony W]

One thing I felt over the years of showing was if you wanted to develop a clientele and go back to a show over and over, you couldn't be changing your prices a lot. If someone buys a piece for 100 and someone else gets a similar piece for 50, it kind of sours them if they see it, or hear about it. I always felt if you price your stuff lower you can always raise it when it starts to sell out, but you shouldn't be lowering prices so someone who paid the 100 this week sees you next week with it for 50. :You can always bs about differences, but if they both look like a duck, and both quack, they probably won't believe one is a chicken, unless it is demonstrable, lol. T