Farmers Market Lessons

This weekend, I sold at the Woodstock Farmers Market for the first time. It was a lot of fun! I will definitely return next weekend and probably just about every Saturday after that until it ends in late October.

The other sellers were great. The guy next to me had fresh produce and herbs, and he gave me free rosemary, basil, and garlic! Next week I am going to give him some of my Mosquito Repellent and Cooling Aloe Gel in return.

I also bought some croissant doughnuts from a bakery booth (Bex's Bakery, I believe, but I can't find them online) and they were delicious. I bought some lavender tea bath soaks and a lavender plant from another seller. Once it blooms, I am going to use the lavender flowers for some of my products!

There was another bath & beauty seller - I didn't catch the name of their booth - and the seller was really great about giving me tips after I told her I usually only sell online. She started three years ago with just one table full of soap, and now she has multiple tables and setups and is doing very well. It was a bit nerve wracking being so close to her booth, but things ended up going just fine.

For the first hour, though, I was convinced this was going to be a disaster. Truth be told, I've sold at two farmers markets and one craft show previously, and I always feel the same way. I never sell any products during the first 45-60 minutes of any show, and the Woodstock Market is only three hours long every Saturday. So for the first hour, I inevitably panic about how I'm going to lose money and everybody is going to hate me. By the end of the show, I feel differently. Every. Time.

And with that in mind, I learned a lot of lessons during this first show that I'm sure will help ease my panic in future weeks:

1. Double check your supplies. I left the house and had a nagging feeling that I forgot this small cardboard box with tape (so I could hang up my banner) and my price displays, and when I got to the market I discovered that I absolutely did forget all of that. My dad ended up bringing it over (thanks, Dad!), but it was too late to hang up the banner.
2. Arrive earlier than you think you need to. By the time I got there - which was about 45 minutes before the show started - there were already more sellers than the organizers had anticipated, so a lot less room. My booth ended up being kind of out of the way (although not as much as some other sellers) and as a result, I missed a fair amount of traffic.
3. Make friends. I'm pretty shy, but the guy next to me was so talkative and nice that I felt right at ease talking to him. It was extremely nice of him to give me free things, and I would have returned the favor if I had been more prepared. 
4. Bring LOTS of samples! I failed here. I only brought three samples. The other bath & beauty seller told me that she gets traffic by inviting people over to try things and suggested I do the same (she really was shockingly helpful). The produce seller next to me handed out some garlic cloves to people, and he also gave women and children flowers - including me! He really was so sweet.
5. Also sell some inexpensive items. I think I heard the bath & beauty seller promoting her $1 lotions (or something like that). All the items that I sold were my most expensive items, but I had one person ask me if I sell 1 oz mosquito repellents, and I think that's not a bad idea.
6. Smile! And talk to people! The produce seller next to me was way better at that than I was. I was actually pretty good about keeping a smile on my face the whole time (it can get so boring between customers), but he was great about saying good morning to everyone and inviting them over to his booth.
7. Start preparing early. I was pretty good at this. Every day last week, I would come from work and spend three hours working on Squeaky Clean. I expanded my inventory, labeled and laminated my items, and packed up. I even stayed up until 1 AM the night before the market to finish getting ready. And yet, somehow, I still wasn't totally prepared. Half of my bath salts weren't labeled, so I didn't try to sell the rest. I didn't do a mock set-up beforehand, so organizing my items was a mess when I first arrived.

There are probably more lessons to be learned, but those are my top seven. Can't wait until next weekend!

Thanks, Lucky Magazine!

My birthday was on June 13 (I'm a quarter of a century old!) and so I went on a little weekend trip to a resort in northern Georgia. When I came back, I checked my Etsy stats and noticed that I had a lot of views from luckymag.com.

"Could this be the Lucky Mag?" I thought. "No...that's ridiculous..."

Well, I was so awesomely wrong, because Lucky Magazine absolutely featured one of my bath salts in their article "11 Etsy Beauty Products to Help You Survive Summer's Heat."

Ahh! See?!?!

As you can imagine, this is a big deal to me. I mean, everyone has heard of Lucky.

Hillary reached out to me on Etsy after the article came out to let me know, which I greatly appreciated. And of course I immediately went and posted links to the article on Etsy, Facebook, and Pinterest. This was basically the best birthday gift the Internet could have given me.

There are ten other cute Etsy products in the article, so definitely browse around. I particularly like this soap and concealer.

DIY End Table Makeover

I don't think I've ever mentioned this, but I only moved into my first apartment last September. Before that, I had spent 15 months in a house with my sister. Since she had been living there for awhile before I moved in, I never really decorated. I was in a small second bedroom that wasn't big enough to hold my queen size bed - not if I wanted to have anything else in the room, that is. So for the first couple months, I slept on two mattress pads folded up, until I saved enough money to purchase a futon. I had two end tables - one was my brother's, and I think the other one belonged to my parents. Eventually my sister gave me an old desk of hers and I bought a bookshelf. And that was it. That was all my furniture.

So you can imagine how exciting it's been to move into an apartment and decorate it with my roommate, who also happens to be my cousin. You've already seen the tray that I decorated for the living room and the book clock that I placed in the dining area. But lately I've been thinking that my bedroom furniture could be better. Here's a breakdown of what I have in the bedroom now:

1. Queen size bed - this thing is massive. I don't know what I was thinking when I picked it out. Oh, yes I do; I was thinking "SO GORGEOUS." And it is! But it's too big. I have a matching armoire, but it's also massive and so it can't actually fit in my room with the bed. Clearly, I was not thinking practically when I purchased these items.
2. Desk - The desk was damaged in the move, which the movers neglected to tell me. I'll probably buy a new one at some point, but for now it's fine as is.
3. Bookshelf - This was also damaged in the move, which the movers also neglected to tell me! A month or two after I moved in, the bookshelf actually snapped in half, with the bottom half breaking and the top half falling off. Luckily, it's right next to one of the closets, and the door was open, which caught the top part. I kept the top part.
4. Two end tables - one from my brother and one from my parents. The one from my brother is plain brown wood, with two shelves. The one from my parents has a nice little design and a tiny drawer.

The other day I was looking at the end tables and I thought, "Wow, I hate these things." So I decided to remake them. I started with the one that has only shelves and plain wood.

You see how scratched up it is? I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner.

I really wanted to do this right, so the first thing I did was sand the top down until it was perfectly smooth.

Next, I painted it white, with Behr Premium Plus Ultra Primer & Paint. For the life of me, I cannot remember what color white I chose, so I'll check that when I get home. I gave the table two coats.

Already looking much better!

I actually did this over the course of two nights, because I started late at night, and I didn't fancy waiting for the second coat to dry so I could do the next part. So the next night I came back and flipped the table over to paint the bottom of the legs (no pictures for this, sorry). Then I taped off parts of the table in a crisscross manner. And I taped off the edges.

Supernatural is on the TV. Yay Dean!

Like all great ideas, I found this design on Pinterest - more specifically, from a great blog called Michelle's Pixie Dust.

Michelle painted her table with white spray paint and then acrylic green paint. I did mine with white interior paint and then Ceramcoat metallic gold acrylic paint. I really wanted to use green paint, but I had a hard time finding a shade I liked in a big bottle, and I didn't know how many little bottles I would need. When in doubt, always buy more than you'll need, right?

Yes, an empty soda cup is on the ground. My roommate's cat likes to play with them.

I did two coats, just like with the white paint. I waited about thirty minutes for the second coat to dry before stripping off the tape.

Ta-da!

Doesn't that look loads better? I don't know if you can tell, but there was some gold paint that made it underneath the tape, so I did a few touch-ups. Then I sprayed a clear finish over the table and let it dry some more. The next morning, I brought it into my room.

So much better!

Yes, that's the Twilight series on the bottom shelf. I do not like Twilight. I actually underlined all the passages that show an abusive relationship, Meyer's constant obsession with words like "chagrin," and other troublesome areas. I put the series on that shelf because there wasn't  enough room on the bookshelf for everything and I figured Twilight didn't deserve to be with the other books. But now the bookshelf is broken and the end table looks pretty, so I'm going to switch them out with Harry Potter.

And the lamp is new and I haven't decided how I'm going to improve it - I may not do anything with it. But it will need a light bulb eventually, I suppose. I haven't done anything with the second table yet, but it's definitely on my to-do list.

Anyway, to recap:

New item!

Okay, I'm really bad at this whole blogging thing. I was hoping to write a post once a week, and it's not like I don't have plenty to write about. But you'll have to forgive me for being MIA for almost a month.

As a way to make up for it, I posted a new item on my Etsy shop! Meet my fabulous whipped body butter, made with refined African Shea butter and coconut oil.

I love this stuff. Love, love, love it. And I'm not the only one! I passed around a sample jar at work today for everyone to try, and people were talking about how soft their hands felt, how there's no greasy feeling, etc. One woman even came over later to try some more. Another person, a friend of mine, told me she thinks it's my best product yet (I use her as a test subject for all my products).

I can tell this product is going to be a big success, and I'm so glad! I was actually going to sell whipped body butter back when my shop first opened, but I couldn't perfect the recipe. I was using unrefined African Shea butter and it wasn't whipping correctly, plus I didn't like the smell and the gritty feeling.

The recipe I had found online said to melt the Shea butter before whipping. I think that's where things went wrong. For my new product, I chose refined Shea butter and didn't melt it. It took a little longer to whip, but the result was absolutely worth it.

I also included Vitamin E to help repair damaged skin and lock in the moisture. It really is a luxurious butter, and I'm so pleased I was finally able to perfect my recipe!