Wenatchee - Apple Blossom Festival

Judy, Valerie and I had the opportunity to take our business Windmill Lettering, to Wenatchee to participate in the Apple Blossom Festival this past weekend. We all worked very hard to get ourselves, our families and our shop prepared to go and I am happy to report a successful and fun time had by all. The festival is a huge event in Wenatchee and everyone in town itself and many of the surrounding communites come. There are many activities taking place like bands playing, parades, fun-runs, food booths, golf tournaments, pie eating contests and of course the craft show which we were a part of. At first we really felt like rookies. Lots of the vendors there have large shops and are professionals. They move from show to show every weekend. The booth next to us does about 35 shows per year and each weekend throughout the spring and summer they move their operation from show to show. They sell scone mix.....for $6.25 a bag (yikes!). All of them were raving about what a great show Apple Blossom is/was and how lucky we were to get in it our first year. We were getting a little nervous about what to expect. It did not turn out to be quite as crazy busy as we thought it would be. Some said they only did about 50% of what they usually do. There were very large crowds and we did well but the rain on Saturday just after the parade caused a lot of people to leave early that day which traditionally is the biggest day. There were lots of other lessons we learned such as:

• We need to get a merchant account to have the ability to accept credit cards.
• We need to bring warmer clothes...just in case.
• We need to have a more comfortable chairs to sit in. 3 days in a folding chair is not good!
• We need to raise our prices. (we could have charged at least 20%+ more than what we did)
• We need to include sales tax in the price of the item. It is a big hassle to look up the taxes with each sale.
• We need to do some tweeking in our booth on our displays. Especially the cash register area.
• We need more merchandise. I thought there was no way we would be able to display everything we had but we were able to and we could have had twice as much and still sold a bunch more. Especially the more popular items.
• We need more custom stuff. People love that! And they love it when we can make it right away for them.

Anyway, here are some pictures of our booth. It looked really really good and it was really fun. We will most definitely do it again next year. Our next sale this year is Maple Valley Days in Maple Valley June 12 -14. We have A LOT of work to do to get ready!