How not to get started as a Greeting Card Publisher #2
Start small, don't launch at the largest trade show in the industry!
Firstly, thank you for the lovely response to my last post, How not to get started as a Greeting Card Publisher #1
I didn’t mean to leave it on such a cliffhanger, honest!
Part 2
Lets say you have a collection of cards ready to pitch to potential stockists or direct to the public, what do I mean by starting small?
I mean…
Local Craft Fairs (hugely popular at the moment)
Art Fairs in your area
Ask your local gift shop (if you’re lucky enough to have one!) if they might stock your cards on a sale or return basis
Get a stand at your local village fete/ charity dog show/hospice fundraiser
You will get feedback, some not always welcome, people will either buy your cards or they’ll gleefully tell you to your face why they’re not going to! It’s healthy to face a little rejection now and again (that’s what I tell myself anyway)
These types of event might not be where your target audience hangs out in large numbers but the law of averages says some of them should pass your stall and even if they don’t buy, they might comment and you can ask them what their favourite is, it’s a good way to gauge which cards are your potential best sellers
There are other ways such as online greeting card market places, which I’ll talk more about in Part 3, but they didn’t exist for me at this point of my story.
What I’m trying to say is, don’t go and spend £5k plus on a stand that’s too big for what you have to show at the biggest trade show in the UK, Spring Fair at the NEC, Birmingham.
I’m not totally sure how relevant trade shows are in 2023 to ‘making it’ as a publisher but back in 2015 they were the key route to market.
In my defence, I had done 2 small shows in advance and people liked and were buying my cards.
And I was in a rush, this was a second career for me, I was in my early forties so for me, time was getting on, I wanted to get this business started, I was not hanging around.
I’d done trade fairs in my old job, I knew what they were about and what you needed to do and I didn’t want to wait another year, I wanted to fast track myself past that first ugly difficult, slow, painful stage of starting a new business… turns out you can’t really skip that part…
A RANT Note on Trade Shows
“Because your artwork is so good it deserves a larger space to be seen properly!”
To this day, I still can’t believe I fell for that line, I was over 40 years old ffs!
Don’t get me wrong, I love doing a show, they are exciting but the first rule of trade shows is the sales staff work to commission, the larger the stand they sell, the more commission they get, they are not to be trusted. Also read the small print, this year at Spring Fair they added in a £699 compulsory charge for meetings with stockists, but you had to leave your stand to attend these meetings (it was not a popular additional expense)
I would probably make an exception of Spring Fair Scotland at the SECC Glasgow, unless the organisation has undergone a major transformation they were fabulous and did not oversell to exhibitors, I also had good experiences with Harrogate Home & Gift and BCTF (no longer running)
I have a love/hate relationship with Trade Shows, I feel they are not as relevant today as they used to be, certainly you don’t need to be doing 2-3 a year, in fact I stopped doing trade shows in 2017, there are a lot of other ways to attract stockists which don’t involve investing thousands into doing a show. If you want my tips let me know in the comments? I can always write another post about that.
I have found my spiritual home at Crufts which isn’t strictly speaking a trade show it’s a retail show but I do pick up a lot of wholesale clients there (I met the stationery buyer for Fenwicks there a few years ago) I have 130,000 people over 4 days walking past my stand, I make an excellent profit and it’s the only show I need to do all year.
If a show works for you, you soon know about it.
I have a niche, and it is dogs, it doesn’t really even run to cats, the only reason I have cat cards is that my oldest stockist is a cat person and bullies me into designing them for her!
With hindsight, having such a niche was not a good fit for Spring Fair, you are reliant on the buyer being a dog person and/or their shop being in the countryside or on the coast and frequented by dog people, straight away you’re not of interest to a lot of stockists attending the show.
There are always rumours at Trade Shows of other stall holders signing a massive deals for £20,000 with a distributor from America or the buyer from John Lewis was doing the rounds and had just signed up the most unlikely publisher, you know the one, they hand embelish every card with straw and diamante and you think their cards are truly awful so there’s hope for you yet.
It’s why I compare it to gambling, there was always the ‘what if’ being dangled in front of you!
There were plenty of success stories, the year I did Spring Fair, my neighbours at this show took anything between £5k and £19k, I’d taken £1,000, I had orders from 10 new stockists and in today’s terms that would be classed as a great success for a first show, and even with hindsight I think now that I did really well for a first show, but a lot in this business is about mindset and at the time I was gutted and I felt the show had been a complete failure, my goal had been to cover my costs and I came up massively short.
Tanget alert!
I realised when I was looking at the old stand photo from part one of this series that two of my very first collections are still selling well on my website and in shops in the UK, Canada and Australia, that’s really made my day, and while I;m here I should probably let you know where you can see my greeting cards, if you don;t know me already then I’m hopeful you might be a little bit curious by now - here’s the greeting card section of my website
But…It’s really about the people you meet
Trade shows are not just about selling, there’s the networking, there’s being seen and there’s the learning!
The best thing that came out of that show for me was meeting and becoming friends with Jan Morley of Perkins & Morley, a hugely creative and prolific product creator and fine artist over at Jan Morley Art and she’s also appearing in Landscape Artist of the Year over on Sky Arts in January 2024.
SO, the super talented and experienced Jan shared so many ideas and tips and tricks with me, I was so grateful for her generosity, plus I have never laughed so much in my life!
This is Jan doing the ‘Bestseller Bolt’, a ‘sales move’ we invented whereby you made the Usain Bolt gesture pointing to your bestsellers…
And this is me, deploying the ‘Sales Lunge’ another technique whereby you lunge out of your stand and shock passersby into talking to you.
Perhaps there was already a decline in attendance for these shows, but I should mention that a lot of shows are shockingly under-attended and things can get a bit silly when creatives are left alone for too long…
Do you have a person in your life that when they tell you to do something you do it?
Well, Jan is that person for me, she got me to diversify and I got my work on other products, she introduced me to other manufacturers, before I knew it I had cushions, coasters, teatowels, mugs and for a time brooches, and where was I going to house all these new products?
Yep, a warehouse! but not any old warehouse, an outsourced warehouse! Overnight, I had my warehouse, without having to manage the staff 🙌
But I’m getting ahead of myself, before I found my warehouse solution, I made a decision to pack it all in on a chance meeting with another publisher, so where did that leave me?… Part 3 of this tale will be with you next week🙄
Ah the early days - and that ask - Discover Dogs? Sure why not! So proud of you