We have a Room of Requirement. It holds my husband’s drawing table, exercise equipment bought with excellent intentions, the gift wrap collection, bedding without a home, and now my entire office. Somewhere underneath all of it is a room that could become whatever I need it to be. I’m working on figuring out what that is.
Before you visit a single booth space, do this first. There is so much you can find out about a potential location from behind your keyboard, and most vendors never think to look. Here is exactly how I research a space before I ever get in my car.
A client mentioned worrying that people did not know about an event, and my brain immediately started opening tabs. What started as thoughts about promotion turned into a bigger realization: if we’re putting this much effort into an event, it needs to pull its weight and keep working long after the night is over.
You find a paint line you love and find out you can become a retailer. The buy-in sounds manageable. The math is more complicated than it looks. Here is what I wish someone had laid out for me before I did it.
You probably have more content than you realize. Product photos, old videos, blog posts from finished projects. The problem isn’t that any of it is bad. It’s that it got disconnected from what your business looks like now. That’s a different problem, and it’s more solvable than starting over.
I went into a booth seller discussion thinking I already had the answer. A well-staged, intentional booth signals that you care. It helps customers visualize. It does the work. Then I read the responses and had to rethink the whole thing.
There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from having a finished project sitting right in front of you and still not being able to write about it. You know what you made. You know what you used. You could explain it out loud to anyone who walked in the door. But the blank…
I found it at a thrift store for five dollars. It was red, scuffed, covered in old stickers, and had that particular smell that vintage things get when they have been stored somewhere interesting for a few decades. I had no idea if it was worth anything. I had no idea what I was going…
Resellers do not have a finding problem. They have a keeping-up-with-what-they-found problem. There is a difference, and most buying advice misses it entirely...
Some containers are too good to toss. The problem is making them look like they belong in your home instead of your recycling bin. This is the one supply that completely changed how I approach them.