How did the Pride of Dakota Showcase go?

So how’d that Pride of Dakota show go?

The craft fair and the end of my slow meltdown.

Overall, the show had impressive numbers. About 15K people came through the doors, and I heard buzz from others that some vendors were ecstatic about their sales.

If you wanted to know how it went for me, personally, I did some math. Out of 15K people who came into the show, I had 45 sales.

n(.01)(15000) = 45
150n = 45
n = 0.3%

0.3% of all show attendees purchased something at the booth.

That’s not to say they didn’t stop near the booth. I was surrounded by a flood of traffic because I was in the main aisle, had a high huge sign with lights, and next to a booth selling food.

Not gonna lie, but I had Philippians 3:19 running through my head as I watched the two days of the show play out around me.

Their god is their stomach.

I saw a strange pattern of human behavior. People walked in the main door to the event and made a beeline for food, ping-ponging between the food and alcohol booths. It was a Christmas-feeding frenzy.¹

Next to me was a double booth selling cookies, bars, and breads, and I was able to see this up close. There was a continuous line of people, at times lining up across my booth. I heard more over-the-top gasps about edible cookie dough than at an amusement park. People couldn’t throw their money across the counter fast enough. When I took a break and walked through the show, the food and alcohol booths couldn’t keep up.

Something about appetite struck me as I watched this over two days, which I will write about later. Yes, this epiphany came only a few weeks before Epiphany.

In fact, I’ll be exploring several topics on this blog more in the coming year, topics that came strongly to mind as I people-watched at the show.

• Appetites, and what happens to what we feed.

• Actions, words, and voting.

• The American consumer vs the American producer.

• How to determine what success is.

To segue from that last item, you may be wondering if the show was a success.

I don’t know.

My goal was to promote my business and the mystery book series and create things that would encourage and bring people joy in a world of cheap imported junk. I didn’t have a particular sales goal, nor did I think I’d do much more than break even. But I wanted to create individually humanized products in a sea of mass production.

I’m not convinced people wanted what I was selling, literally and figuratively. You can’t “rescue” people from what they are comfortable with, and we Americans like lots of cheap possessions.

That’s not to say people didn’t want my time.

I had a number of people who glanced at the booth and then stopped only to talk to me about their interest in art and get suggestions. I had no fewer than nine people do this, showing me their drawings and paintings on their phones, wanting encouragement and tips. Because of a dinosaur painting in my booth, I had several longer chats with two young elementary-aged boys who liked dinosaurs and wanted to talk about them (which was kind of funny).

That’s okay.

I wanted to be encouraging, so I listened, chatted, and offered suggestions if they asked. Is that a success if no sale was made? Maybe. I’ll write more about that in a post some other day.

I do want to touch on actions and “voting” briefly because incongruent behavior puzzles me.

In the same way that the appetite we feed grows the strongest, my actions are also a vote. One man came over and said that it was nice to see a new vendor at the show instead of all the usual ones, but then he walked to the food booth, one of the usual ones. That math confuses me.

As I told my sister, I’m almost 51. I don’t need compliments on my work; that’s more of a currency for your 20s. I didn’t go through all the effort to be at the show in order to receive compliments. I came to sell. A purchase is the vote that keeps a vendor coming back, not compliments.²

When I shopped at the other vendors, I purposefully chose ones that didn’t have huge crowds around them. I want to vote for the empty booth with the vendor sitting awkwardly, surrounded by crowds fighting for chocolates and alcohol.

If I felt discouraged, I’m sure they did. I wanted to show them, not just tell them, that their time had value.

But lest you think this is about lowlights, never fear, because there were some real highlights. Here’s what I know:

• I have some fine friends. I so appreciated those of you who came to the booth, supported me, bought things, and encouraged me. You know who you are because I practically mobbed you because there were warm bodies in my booth at last. You took time out of your busy weekend, and it matters. I’m tearing up as I write this, seriously.

• A woman came into the booth and saw the bridge painting. She loved it and bought it. Neither of us knew it at the time, but when God had me paint it, he had her in mind. And now she has a painting on her wall of a beloved local bridge that will be gone soon, a painting all her own to enjoy in her own home that no one else anywhere on earth has. I didn’t expect to sell any art; who can compete with Hobby Lobby? And who can compete with God’s wonderful little surprises?

• I got to meet a couple of blog readers I’d never met (one has been reading for 15 years!) who took the time to find the booth and talk to me, and that was a real treasure.³ Thank you for stopping in to say hello!

• One older man was walking briskly by until he saw the sign about the kids’ mystery books being a faith-fueled adventure. He paused, read it again, marched into the booth, grabbed two sets of books, paid without hesitation, and kept walking.⁴ His confidence in the purchase of the books was a surprising shot of confidence for me. Thank you, whoever you are. And thank you to the handful of people who bought those sets of three books. I so hope they are enjoyed and passed on.

• My sister and my friend helped me and stayed positive and upbeat even as I watched thousands of people walk by and not even glance inside the booth. I couldn’t have done the set-up, run the booth, and torn it down without their help. It was too much mentally, emotionally, and physically.

That’s a list of treasures.

Will you do it next year?

“Are you glad you did it?” a friend asked me the day after it was over.

I don’t know.

The day after the show, when I was tired and my back hurt, I was pretty sure the answer was no. The numbers—financial and time costs—say it was a failure. However, as my friend prodded me, the numbers would be slightly different next year because some expenses (e.g., buying expensive card stands) wouldn’t be repeated.

“You could just sell the remaining stock, so you don’t have to put so much time into making it all again,” he said.

Maybe.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful.

As I said, my hope going in was that people would become aware of my company, and that I would make things that would bring joy. It’s possible those things happened, but I don’t know. When you have immeasurable goals, you can’t measure if you’ve hit them or not. I guess God knows.

In my own after-action writing, I reviewed my plan and efforts to see if I’d hit key markers throughout the year.

I bought advertising in a local magazine, snagged radio time at the show, created an event and ads on social media, and told people via word-of-mouth, personal texts, and so on. I redid my entire website, creating coupons and a better shopping cart. I calculated wholesale options for some items and made information available.⁵ I designed and had completely new marketing materials printed. I hand-painted a large sign to match the new website. I painted two large panels of the characters from the books to catch attention in the booth. I left wholesale information with the tourism center in town and contacted a few other businesses whose owners I thought might be interested in wholesale postcards.

Whatever else that time and money was, it’s gone.

I can spend a lot of time with what-ifs. I only had a single booth, so what if I had a larger booth? What if people didn’t have to come in? What if I displayed it differently? What if I hadn’t been drawing in the booth? What if I was more extroverted? What if I was a better artist and writer? What if I had covered all my art in chocolate, bread, and cookies?

“I’m sure if they just knew what you had, people would have come in!”

“I’m sure people looked you up, and you’re going to see real sales off of it!”

Maybe. There’s a reason for A/B testing.

But I have to forge a path I’m supposed to take according to what God wants, not according to what a business guru suggests. I’m concerned I took the leap and went all in this year to the detriment of other things that might have had more spiritual and relational value for the people around me.

Maybe in a few months, I’ll forget the exhaustion of it all and have a different answer. For now, I’m going to give it a hard “we’ll see.” I guess I’ll talk to God about it and make sure it’s what I’m supposed to be doing.

Perhaps, somewhere in those 45 customers, or the people who wanted to chat with me about their art, something I said made a real difference in their lives, but I can’t really know. I guess God knows.

So now we come to the end of it.

My art and writing have never really been about platform-building or something externally driven. They are internally motivated.

I once told a young man who was studying art that being an artist and being a production artist are two very different things. The latter could make you hate art. It can wear you down. My takeaway from this show and from the almost 30 years preceding it with many similar experiences is that I will continue to do my art and writing, but likely, most of it will be just for me and my family.

I need the outlet. That’s how God made me. It’s the skillset he gave me. It’s how I work through things.

But if what I make can’t compete with an $8 loaf of banana bread or Target’s $5 section, then I will stop wasting my time and energy trying to sell and come up with something else. There’s no sense filling the house with piles of canvases. Most have been painted over at least three times anyway due to a lack of space. That seems silly.

I have an idea of a solution, though I am not going to elaborate on it now. I may expand on it later, on my website, for the artistically driven folks who are in the same predicament: needing to create, but what you create piles up until you throw it.

And, as noted, I’ll write about several thoughts that came to me on this blog in the coming months. I suspect I’ll also write about my continued consideration of what is success and failure in life as I did in 2007 when I was a decade out of college. I have to assume 2007 Julie imagined, nearly twenty years later, that 50-year-old Julie would have figured it out.

I kind of think none of us do.

1. I worked in a bakery for a few years. Yes, frenzy is the right word.

2. I’m aware there is a dynamic that happens at these shows (because I’ve experienced it, too) where you can’t afford the art object, but you admire it and want to encourage the vendor. So you either walk by quickly and avoid making eye contact because you’re worried there will be pressure and confrontation to say “no,” or you compliment them and keep walking. I do understand this; I’m an introvert, so this is the internal war that happens at these shows for me. What I do is I at least meet their eyes and take a business card while giving the compliment (the hope of a future connection) or I try to find small-ticket items in their booth if possible so I can at least spend a few dollars for a more tangible vote. If anything, it will make a nice little gift in my gift closet for someone down the road. Knowing this phenomenon existed, I had low-priced items ($2) available at the outer edge of my booth, clearly marked.

3. Admittedly, when someone comes up to me and says, “I read your blog,” I don’t know if I should duck for an incoming punch because you know how I write sometimes.

4. That almost made me tear up. I have worked so hard on those books, and it’s been hard to see such a lack of measurable, tangible success. I have sent out untold free copies to different places. I’ve tried to get them in the local Christian bookstore. Those books are something I really feel God wants me to do, and I am going to obey, but it’s hard to understand why I should keep doing them if very few are interested. I guess he knows, and I will have to be content that if I’m supposed to spend years writing and pouring money into books very few read so it makes a difference for one child, then so be it.

5. The most I’ve gotten out of the new website is a lot of spammers and scammers trying to get me to drop-ship large numbers of books to Belize so they can wholesale them.