What I learnt by being a shop keeper!

Lets Create Crafts participated in 4 exhibitions so far. 
Two of them went amazing, made profit enough to run the whole place for a few months, and the other two - were outright disgusting. -4 digit profits!
Was I Surprised - yes. Angry - yes. Cursed my stars - yes :). Lost faith in humanity - yes (laugh again!). Doubted if anyone ever will want my product again - Yes. Remembered my mom saying that business is tough and is not for me - Yes. Wanted to scream and go back - Yes.

Will I do it again.. - Hell Yes.

Though I had made negative sales, what I learnt from those 2 'failed' exhibitions was very valuable. Here are a few of those learnings:

1. It is DEFINITELY not luck
I met an uncle during one of those exhibitions - he basically was into advertizing for exhibitions, he collected numbers of women having stalls and gave them info on where the next exhibitions were held. He said "Stall lagana hamara kaam hai, sales kitne honge hamari kismat hai (Our work is to put up stalls, the kind of sales happening is our luck)"

Sorry. I don't think so.

I've learnt that homework is more important than the stall itself. You know your product - who will want your product, who can shell money for it and who won't.

Let me give you an example. If you are selling earrings which college kids would love (and buy) and you put a stall in a place where Marwari aunties constitute 90% of the crowd - on a weekday, dude you are going to have -ve sales and are going to feel pathetic about yourself at the end of two days. [I've mentioned Marwari aunties on purpose - I feel they have an awesome taste of dressing up and wearing jewelry - more than any other aunties I know - but there is only a specific type of jewelry they like and buy - yep, the one with American diamonds and those beautiful ethnic designs.. aah I love those!]

Ahem*, back to the blog.. So the next time you setup a stall, please do pray to god( it is very important) but also do a little (a lot of) research on the crowd that is expected to come in, if it is a weekday or weekend, the location of the stall, what the organizers are doing to promote the event, the type of newspapers they are giving ads in, almost EVERYTHING!

2.  If you don't love it - do it anyway - atleast once.
Exhibitions are the best way to interact with LOTS of people. Imagine that. Where else can you get a continuous stream of people coming in, who want to give a couple of seconds of eyeballs to your stall? Unless you are holding a recruitment event - no! You get to meet a lot of people - customers, people who do same thing as you, your prospective evangelists, people who think what you do is silly!, people who get inspired by what you do and want to participate - lot of them. 

So the next time I put a stall, I'd have lot of research behind it. And then guage the results.