Claire and Fliss have been busy these past few weeks, prepping and packing up stock for our first ever festival. I have no real concept of time, so it wasn't really on my radar until 4 days before when I went into action mode and ordered lots of things we'd need, and painted some signs for our very rustic, and, homemade vibe stand.
Fliss and I arrived on the Friday evening and were later joined by Alex, an honorary MBH member. We were up until the light faded, setting up as much as we could.
My dad kindly loaned us his faded, well-loved, marquee, and everything was a bit handmade/taped together/higgledy piggledy, but it worked, I think, added to the charm.
It was a bit of a trial by fire as it was our first ever festival, and I had little/no interest in the prep, until around 4 days before when I made ALL THE SIGNS. I was still making signs on the bonnet of my car when the festival opened. Claire and Fliss had done a few run-throughs in the garden in the weeks running up to the festival, so we didn’t go in completely blind and had made sure all the stock we needed was packed up, labelled and ready to go.
It was an intense weekend, and a bit of a technology nightmare. I hid myself away from anything business related, and mostly just hung out with, and gave scritches, to all of the dogs who came to visit. Claire, Fliss and Alex were on hand with friendly faces to greet everyone and deal with customers and sales.
We were also lucky enough to have amazing festival neighbours including; Buddy Care, Snuffles Shop and the very lovely Whimsical Tails! Our technology issues were very kindly solved by the K9 Aqua Sports team that were there opposite us - a great spot for us to watch pups launching themselves into the water all day!
There were so many dogs, I think we were all in heaven. At one point we became a doggy day-care as their human went off to do some shopping. They may have wanted to stay with us because we had fancy Buxton water to drink.... A few people even said their dogs only drank from the bowls at our stand!
I loved meeting Starlight the Lurcher and Monty who looked exactly like my sign which was perfect.
We took so much stock, lots of our best sellers which included; China mugs, comfy socks, enamel and ceramic pins, tea towels, tote bags. Our brand new dog oven gloves were so popular. The team were showcasing some of our apparel throughout the weekend too.
The ceramics were also a hit, and it was a great opportunity to see all of the pieces together. We had the Bowls, plates, bamboo-lid cannister, trivets and a huge selection of coasters - there were a lot of cat lovers there that day too so I think they appreciated that MadebyHarriet has great cat stuff too!
We also had our only copy of my very first book Tell Your Dog I Love Them (due out in September) who people to have a sneak-preview of.
There were a few kinks to work out when we got there in terms of layout and we experimented with what looked best throughout the day, but by Sunday the stall looked great - homemade signs were very on brand. Don’t be afraid to keep moving stuff around until the flow works when you're setting up your own stall.
I managed to source a tonne of used tennis balls (used in tennis, not by other dogs) to give away, and we also had lots of treats and postcards to give away. This definitely drew people in, they were out the front, alongside a lot of products, rather than in the marquee so people didn't feel any pressure to come inside, as I know this puts people off sometimes (as it does me...)
I wish we'd been a little more prepared with weights and clips and stuff as it was quite windy, but we'll be more on it next time. I'm going to do our next blog on 'What we should have done for our first festival'. Hindsight is a wonderful thing but hopefully that will help anyone out there planning to do their own stall at any point.
Thanks to all the lovely people we met, we had such a great time and are looking forward to doing some more in-person things now we've (sort of) got the hang of it!
