Attending Canada Day we have done more than once in the past in Keremeos but not as vendors. We were not sure what to expect. With only 6 vendors on site, it looked a bit bleak but we ended up selling enough JamBusters! product to end the day at our second-best sales day for 2017. It was a much better day than we expected and we had a great time.
The following day we were back in Okanagan Falls for our weekly vending date. Again, without warning it became busy in spurts and product started disappearing. By the end of the day we had out-sold the previous day in Keremeos by one jar! It actually meant that we had set two records on the same weekend and ended up breaking one of them.
The following three Sundays in OK Falls were well off the pace. Although each one had a slightly higher sales total than the previous one, we were getting a little discouraged. By the time we started feeling this way a surge of foot traffic would appear and save the day. What we noticed in these three weeks was that vendor numbers were also dropping.
Sadly, we have had first-hand experience with markets that tend to lose vendors and the majority of these results from a lack of customers. For us, even on our slow days in July we somehow manage to finish off with a bang. Typically while we are tearing down we will sell some items. One customer bought six jars as we were closing so you never really know.
The final Sunday of July, today the 30th, was pretty awesome in comparison to the previous three Sundays and in actual fact, blew away all our vending numbers for the entire month and most of 2017. There was a lot of buzz on site with radio coverage and foot traffic numbers were extremely high as a result. Plus, there were about a dozen vendors.
The market looked full and actually was full for most of the day. We had a pretty awesome sale going as well. We are going to introduce a new line of salsas so George and I decided it would be a cool idea to do a “Salsa Blowout” at $5 per jar. We took extra jars, just in case. That was a good idea and we just about sold out of the entire inventory we had.
We were also selling a lot of our regular products as well. George was as busy as I was and at one point he was even serving up ‘try-before-you-buy’ taste samples. He didn’t get a chance to finish his lunch until we started to tear down. I barely touched my sandwich for most of the day. For both of us, that was an indicator of how busy our booth was.
By the time we did a final calculation the sales for the day not only topped the two-day total from the start of the month, it blew away our single-day sales record from last year at the OK Falls Community & Farmers Market. It was also just four jars shy of topping our best sales day in all of 2017, which dates back to February at the local Chamber Market.
George also did some extra number crunching and discovered that the sales during July 2017 have surpassed the figures from July 2016. It also shows that comparing market to market, our 2017 numbers from the OK Falls venue are higher than they were in 2016. Sure, not a whole lot higher, but 2017 is still better than 2016. So you could say our business is growing…one jar at a time!