Jiaxin Entry #21

We participated at the 3- Day MOX Parade again last weekends!

I was at the booth on Friday (Day 1) with Cheryl.

In the previous event, I was there on a Saturday and there were significant differences in the atmosphere this time.

In the day, there wasn’t a constant flow of traffic like the previous event, but sales started picking up from evening. This could be due to people working and students schooling hence, only coming to shop around once they are done.

Products

We had a table displaying our ready-made terrariums and terracotta pots, and an extra table for our DIY Terrarium booth. To save us time (as we were all busy with school), we decided to do the repotting at our booth instead of meeting up to design terrariums or to repot the plants. Hence, we brought the succulents over in its original small pot to repot there.

At our previous events where we tried selling our terracotta pots, we have faced two kinds of customers:

Customer liking the pot but not the plant in it - City Square Mall
Customer liking the pot but we did not have any plant available - Katong Square / Mox Parade 1

By bringing the small pots of succulents to the event, we can address these customers concerns by letting them choose the plants to match the pots.

This was effective as we managed to sell much more terracotta pots than our previous events.

I also designed a few terrariums on the spot to sell it as ready-made terrariums as the prior MOX Parade indicated that the Friday crowd were mostly from the working adults from the offices nearby.

Customers

The ready-made terrariums were bought mostly by working adults, while the DIY terrariums were made by mostly youth couples, and children.

Marketing

BEFORE the event:

We posted afew Instagram posts to inform and remind our followers on our event details.

To our surprise, the organiser @Fleawhere helped advertise for us in an Instagram post.

However, the post seems like we were just selling potted succulents and not terrariums, which were our main products. Nevertheless, it is still a boost to our brand, since succulents and the on-spot customization aspect were included.

DURING the event:

I posted several Insta-stories during the event on the few steps involved in customizing a terrarium at our booth. I then added a new highlight on our profile titled “Customize!” so it can be viewed repeatedly by any potential customers that came across our profile.

Through these posts, I hope the 3 easy steps for customization will influence interested parties to head down to our future booths to customize their own terrariums.

AFTER the event:

As usual, we posted another Instagram post to wrap-up the event and to thank our customers for their support.

This time, we decided to try a new way of posting, in that it is not simply an image of our terrariums. Instead, it is faces of our happy and satisfied customers at our DIY booth.

Those photos were taken with the consent of our customers while they were making, and they were more than happy to pose for our photos.

From this post alone, we had more likes and gained afew new followers. This shows that online users may want to see more authentic images of people than seeing just terrariums alone.

Hence, we could take more photos of our customers in the future.

Risks

As we chose to get the outdoor booths, the biggest risk involved is the weather which cannot be controlled by anybody.

The days leading up to the event has been raining continuously. Hence, I checked the weather forecast to be mentally prepared if it rains. The forecast shown were unfavorable to us, indicating it will rain during almost three quarter of the event from 12pm to 6pm.

If it rains, it would create a huge loss for us since no customers will want to shop around in the slippery floors.

Thankfully, there were only dark skies and it did not eventually rain.

Summing up,

The sales for both ready made terrariums and DIY terrariums were about the same, which indicates that we shouldn’t forgo one for the other. Moving forward, we will be having our business showcase soon, and we will have to work on our slides for it.

Till the next post!

Jia Xin

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