offcntr | Oct. 14th, 2019

Clay Fest is over, and I've had (most of) a full night's sleep. A few reflections.

1. It was our most successful show ever; Robin, our treasurer, said we'd grossed over $104,000. Not sure how much that will trickle down to us. One drawback of an otherwise wonderful centralized check-out system is that we don't get our sales feedback in real time. I have Friday evening's numbers, but nothing more until I get my check late this week or early next.

2. It was our fullest show ever: over 70 potters participating, including gallery-only. We had a bunch of shared booths this year, and still had a long waiting list. Side effects include lots of new and interesting work, and one of the strongest gallery displays I've seen in 21 years.

3. Technology continues to improve. Our checkout system has moved over to Square Point-of-Sale and a wifi hotspot. No more shared phone lines, no more waiting for your neighbor to finish a transaction before you could slot in the card on your machine. And since we used them on the cash/check lines as well, the entire show loaded up onto computer as it happened, making accounting so much easier.

We'd also learned a lesson from Ceramic Showcase, whose machines we'd rented: get a phone number at the beginning of every transaction, record it in the "notes" feature. The one thing Square isn't good at (or is too good at, depending on your point of view) is letting you connect with a customer after a sale goes through. This means if we made a mistake--over charge, under charge, or just lose a price tag from the sticker board--we have no way through Square to sort it out. Having a phone number as an emergency fall-back is a huge help. (And something I need to start doing myself; I lost $48 on a declined card taken at a show this summer, with no way to contact the customer. Having a phone number would have bee a lifesaver.)

let there be lights

On a personal front, I finally bit the bullet and purchased some better lighting for my booth. I'd been using clamp lamps and compact fluorescent bulbs for years now, but they're unreliable to assemble, tricky to secure, and messy looking, with dangling cords hanging out. I'd had "research track lighting" on my to-do list since last winter, but finally swung by Jerry's last week to look around. Turns out they have easy-to-assemble kits, four feet of track with three light cans, plus connectors to snap them together, and a snap in cord and plug available. I got two sets with trimmings for under $70. I mounted them on an 8 foot 1x2, bought half a dozen 17 watt LED bulbs (light equivalent to a 100 watt incandescent), and the whole thing hung easily with ball bungies from the center pole of my booth. It lit everything beautifully, and took less than half the time to put up and take down. Next project? Take the old fluorescents to Jerry's to recycle, and the clamp lamps to Goodwill.

One of Clay Fest's (and indeed Showcase and Clayfolk's) best features is also its biggest potential flaw: The centralized check-out table. At all of these shows, you can pick up pottery from any booth and pay for it all at once, cash, check or card, at the sales table. One stop shopping.

It's a necessity for a show we run ourselves; everyone has at least two three-hour shifts to work, when we can't be in our booths. If we were responsible for our own sales, we couldn't do it.

It's kinda nice knowing you don't have to be in your booth all the time; you can go to the bathroom, stop to catch up with friends, swing by the demo to see just how big a pot Tea can throw. It's also tempting to just not come back; you won't miss any sales, right? They'll just take things away to check-out, and you'll get your check later. We all hate being sales-people. This way, we don't have to be.

Except, no. I really believe it makes a difference how much time you spend in your booth, greeting customers, answering questions, getting out restock (or checking your restock to see if you have the pot they'd like best). It sounds cliche, but people really are buying a relationship with the artist as much as they're buying the art. And I firmly believe an empty spot on the shelf is a missed opportunity.

This is why I'm so tremendously grateful to Denise. She minds the booth when I'm working the credit sales station, and we take turns during other parts of the show. Effectively, she works harder in the booth than I do, because I'm frequently on sales shift during the busiest times. I saw a stop-motion video of the first few hours of Clayfolk one year; I could just see into our booth, and she was moving like a hummingbird.