Hosting a Shopping Day

I don’t have a home business, but I admire the effort and courage it takes to run one. So, whenever I know somebody who sells products I’ll use, I try to buy directly from them.

Last weekend, I hosted a home business bazaar at my house. A friend of mine makes jewelry and a sales day she’d recently been planning fell through. When she told me what she needed, it seemed like a fairly easy thing. We picked a date and made it happen. She has all of the connections with other home business owners, so she arranged for all the business people who joined us.

• Robin Gomez brought Norwex, chemically safe cleaning products.
• Kyra Lynn created a pop-up store of LulaRoe clothes.
• Melissa Robinson represented Rodan+Fields skincare.
• Catherine Stultz made everyone’s lips shiny and colorful with her Lipsense line.
• AdinaCreates jewelry was on display
• Along with a display of original paintings by Mary Mallory

The LulaRoe Room

The idea of having so many products together seemed fun to me. It’s as if a mini-shopping all appears and then disappears in your home in just a day! Each lady had lots of opportunities to give her sales pitch, but people who stopped by didn’t feel trapped or pressured to buy something.

Inspiring Cleaning Supplies

In retrospect, I needed to invite 2-3X as many people. I personally invited 25 and a Facebook invite was set up by one of the vendors. Don’t count on the vendors to do much inviting. They might, but the reason vendors like parties is because they bring in people from outside their network. In all, only about 10 people came by. Everyone found something they wanted to buy and the flow of people in and out made for lots of fun chats and hang-out time. BUT, 10 people isn’t a great party for a big group of vendors. Sigh. I only spent about 3 days thinking about inviting and acting on it. A bit more work on that would have produced more foot traffic.

Jewelry & Art

My effort, aside from making sure that my social network was aware and invited, was making the space ready. Three whole rooms were needed for all of the displays. We used the living room, family room and kitchen. I clean the house on Thursday mornings, so nope, I didn’t even clean again. I did a minimal amount of furniture moving and set out snacks. In regard to snacks, I did NOT go to much trouble. I bought cookies and strawberries and made mint tea. So glad I made that choice. I think I ate more than anybody else and there was plenty leftover!

NOT TOO MUCH EFFORT, EH?

Business owners arrived at 8am to set up. Friendly shoppers were invited from 9-1 and everything was cleaned up and gone by 2pm. In the end, it was a fun, social morning. I ended up with a great new pair of leggings, some inspiring cleaning supplies, a sassy new lip color, a great necklace and considerably less money!

Sound like fun? Let me know if you give it a try.