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Last summer I went into one of our local Vintage & Antique malls and asked about having a booth there. There was a long wait list and I signed up.
In December I was notified that an opening would be available in January. I’ll share with you here my journey… the good, the bad and the ugly!
I live in Central Kentucky, near Lexington. This area has many “Vintage & Antique” malls. Heck, in this town of only 28,000 people we have 5 or 6 of them. So how did I choose which mall to have my booth with?
I enjoy visiting the antique malls in our town and neighboring towns as a shopper. I pay attention to the atmosphere and the lighting when I visit.
One thing that was a concern for me was that if the booth was large, I’d never be able to fill it and have it look good.
When I visited one mall in particular, I noticed that they had many spaces as shelf space in addition to large booth space.
In addition to that, I really liked how bright the store was. It has a west/south facing store front that has many windows. (So many of these stores are very dark looking) I asked about pricing.
For shelf space the store I am in charges a monthly fee of $45, plus 10% of any sales of my items.
The shelf space is 4 feet long. I have up to 4 shelves. They are a little over 1 foot deep.
I was told there was a wait list… about 50 people in front of me. I signed up and waited.
You may have the same question for me that my boyfriend had:
WHY do you want to sell in an antique mall when you already sell all the bears you make on your website?
This is my answer… To keep myself from going crazy!
When you work from home all day long it can get pretty lonely. I love working by myself, but even I get a little nuts from being by myself all of the time.
Add in the fact that there are 2 days a week that my boyfriend plays tennis after work (so he’s gone from 6am until 9:30pm) and that is a LOT of alone time!
Knowing that I can “go to work” for a little while, visit with the owner and other vendors as I spruce up my booth does wonders for my mental health!
I try to arrange to go in on one of the days that my boyfriend has tennis to break up that long day.
You would think that when I signed up on the wait list for the booth, that I would have started making bears to place there right away so that I would have a nice display. But I did not. It appears I need to have a concrete deadline in order to motivate myself.
December is a crazy month of course, so I did not get ANY bears completed for the booth.
I decided to go through my collection of artist bears and choose which ones I would be willing to part with. I also chose additional teddy bear related things and some bear magazines.
I priced them up and set up my booth on January 2nd. I should mention that I am not the best at arranging things to make them look good right away. I have to start with something, and then tweak it. Here is how the display started out:
Two days later, my Mom died…. As you can imagine, I practically forgot about my booth.
As time passed, I started getting back into “doing things”. Although I still did not have any bears done for the booth I did want to make it look better!
I had taken measurements of the shelves back in December. I wrote them down, but unfortunately lost that piece of paper. I thought I remembered what they were.
I wanted to add a bit of color to my display and decided to cover some lengths of cardboard with a solid colored wrapping paper. I went to our local Hobby Lobby (a hobby, craft and home decor store) and got some pretty plastic Easter eggs. I also dug out a floral garland I owned.
I looked in my home for other items I could add to the display that I was willing to part with. These items were priced quite a bit lower than the artist bears. Selling these can help pay for the monthly “booth rent”.
I also thought of creating some pillows… (another lower cost item). At first I was going to make dog pillows, but then I remembered I lived in the horse capital of the world! So I decided to start with horse pillows.
I bought some fabric, did some designing and stitched up 4 pillows.
I brought them all to my booth, and there realized that I was wrong on the shelf measurements! Ugh! Oh well, What I have will still brighten up the booth for now, and next visit I can bring shelving coverings in the correct size.
Last week when I went in to the antique mall where my booth is located, I did not have any new items bring, but I did finally make a sign with my business name and also decided to put some items on sale. There are only 7 more days until the end of the month, so I’ll have a 20% off sale.
I wanted the Sale sign to look decent, so I printed it out on my color printer and sized it to fit into a frame I happened to have.
Another reason I decided to have a booth in an antique mall is to try to expose my local public to collectible artist teddy bears.
You don’t really see artist bears in person anywhere. There are some teddy bear shows left, but there are much fewer in person shows now as the costs for artists to attend the shows keep increasing, and it becomes easier and easier to sell bears online. Shops that carry artist bears are becoming fewer and fewer. Teddy Bear magazines, although still published, are not found on the newsstands any longer.
I plan to have some literature printed that explains what artist bears are and why they cost so much more than mass produced teddy bears. I will have it available for free at my booth. When I get it designed, I will offer that here too in case you would like to spread the word too.
It is important to educate the general public about the existence of collectible artist bears so that more people will want to collect them. This is my way of trying to help do just that in my tiny corner of the world.
My marketing plan for the booth has not yet been put into practice, but let me tell you what I plan to do. As I finish bears, I will take them to my booth to be available for sale as my full website price. Each time I do that, though, I will also be bringing some of the bears home to be listed on my website.
It will appear that the bears are being sold at the full price, and so the next time a person stops by my booth and sees a bear that they like, they might be more likely to go ahead and buy it as they will have noticed that the bears appear to sell very quickly.
This strategy may take some time…. but I’m very curious to see how it works out!
I’m so sorry I’ve stopped posting about this! I have yet to try this specific marketing strategy. Shortly after my last post about this, my boyfriend unexpectedly lost his job of 27 years. That kind of threw us into a tail spin and I switched the booth to selling household items (ie: clearing out the house). We thought we were going to have to sell the house and move.
Happily, we do not have to sell the house and move. I am still trying to sell lots of the household items that are just sitting around collecting dust. He’s lived here for 30+ years and raised 4 kids, so there is a lot of STUFF!
I have been making sample memory bears out of shirts, etc and putting them on display here along with a sign telling people that they can have their own bears made from loved one’s clothing. A lot of interest, but nothing from the shop yet.
However, I have SOLD the sample bears that I made! Time to make more samples 😉
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