The Christmas Craft Sale had been hosted by the Chamber for the past five years and ran this year (and the majority of them) in conjunction with the annual community Christmas Light-Up Celebration. This meant there would be activity downtown in the park located next door to the Legion Hall, where the Craft Sale was being held.
A couple days before, we went through the inventory we had stored at home and set aside what we wanted to take to our first-ever Chamber Christmas Craft Sale. The morning of the event George loaded the car and we were off. The event did not start until 11:00 AM but we were unloading and setting up by 9:30 AM along with many of the other vendors. Our table was near the front entrance which made our product virtually the first thing anyone saw as soon as they entered the hall.
There were about 20 vendors in total with all of us representing local home-based or small businesses. It was a great atmosphere and we were set up long before the event got underway. The vendors located beside and behind us were all very friendly and all of us got along great and a couple of us traded products with each other as the day progressed.
What I didn’t expect was to be as busy as we were. By the time we had reached the halfway point of the six hour event we had sales figures that had not only surpassed all our individual sales dates during the summer, it was better than all of the winter off-season events to date. The ‘try-before-you-buy’ samples were moving fast and we started to sell out of some of the products we had on site.
There were several lulls during the afternoon, which gave all vendors a much-needed breather between rushes. We had two large sales with customers stocking up on gift ideas with several other customers buying multiple jars of JamBusters! products for house-warming gifts, company Christmas parties and various other seasonal reasons. George at one point carried a load of product a block away for one customer to put in their car so they could continue to shop at other vendor’s tables.
By the time the last half hour rolled around some vendors were tearing down and packing up. They had apparently had much less business than we had. When the dust settled and we calculated the results we discovered that it resulted in our second best single day sales event in all of 2016. In fact, we were only a few jars shy of setting an all-time single-day sales record since we started vending three years ago.
As you could imagine, we were extremely happy and while it meant we went through a lot of our inventory, it means I will be back in the kitchen filling some holes. We have our final off-season event in two weeks and I’ll need that time to put together some of the most popular JamBusters! recipes so we will be prepared for that event in early December.