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Last weekend, we went to City Square Mall where we held our Christmas Sales. Prior to the event, we had a site recee of our booth location to gauge the crowd on weekends. Despite the huge crowd in the mall, the bazaar location was not as favorable as we thought. We were positioned at an open-air part of the mall. On the bright side, a buffet restaurant opposite the location of our booth draws a significant amount of traffic to where our booth is located.
Inspired by the Gardeners' Day, we decided to venture into hand painted terracotta pots for the Christmas and New year festive season. Cleo also planned to set up a pot painting station to catch the attention of the crowd. We also purchased greeting cards in preparation for the festive season.
With the execution and roster planned out, we felt ready for the bazaar.
Day 1 (21/12)
During the set up of the booth, we were slightly taken aback by the competition we faced. Out of 20 booths, 3 other booths sold air plants, succulent plants and closed terrariums respectively. The booth on our right sold knitted gifts, which is our direct competitor for hand painted festive terracotta pots. At the same time, the booth on our left sold closed terrariums, however they had far lesser variety of designs compared to us.
For our set up, we did up a 'staircase' structure to stand out from the other booths and better display our products. We displayed a few figurines at the bottom most step to capture the attention of children while our greeting cards are placed beside the photo frame, encouraging potential customers to buy gifts for their friends and family for the festive season.
As we predicted, there was not much traffic flow as it is on a weekday. Occasionally we had a few customers buying figurines and greeting cards, but our main products were not selling as well as we thought despite the festive season. Thankfully, we managed to close a few transactions during the lunch and dinner crowds, with customers attracted to Cleo's painting skills.
The day ended with us selling only 1 terracotta pot, which is rather disappointing. However, we noticed that some customers were buying our terrariums because of the price of terracotta pots.
Day 2 (22/12)
After reviewing our Day 1, we concluded that instinctively we were promoting our terrariums and much more could be done to push customers to buy our terracotta pots. Hence we decided to encourage customer to buy our hand painted terracotta pots to increase our sales for it. Coupled with the increased weekend traffic, we manage to sell 4 terracotta pots and 4 terrariums by the end of the lunch.
Our sales slowed down drastically after lunch, to a point where it actually became worse than Day 1. Despite the larger crowd, lesser transactions were made and some booth owners actually left before the dinner crowd came. To our dismay, the dinner crowd was terrible due to the events that the mall held from 6pm to 8pm.
Day 3 (23/12)
Our Day 3 focuses mainly on selling off our festive related products. Certain designs of our terracotta pots and terrariums revolves around Christmas, hence today is the last day to sell it off. After this event, such products are close to impossible to sell off. With a significant amount of Christmas greeting cards remaining, we decided to give them away as a complimentary gift for our customers.
The crowd today was warmer as compared to yesterday's and sales turned out to be better than Day 1, boosting our morale after the setback yesterday. We had much more customers stopping by at our booth, which in turn attracts other curious onlookers. Even though everything was going smoothly, however we were still concerned about the dinner crowd, due to the events held in the mall.
Unexpectedly, a couple came before dinner time and bought 23 terrariums from us. We were occupied with their customisations that we had difficulty coping with other customers at the same time. We took almost 1 hour to complete the sale.
Talk about a Christmas Miracle.
After the event, we had a short discussion regarding the whole event in general. Our total sales for the whole event was within our forecasted range and we concluded that with a site recee prior the event, we can better forecast the sales for the event. We also identified a few areas of improvement for our planning phase. This is definitely our most memorable event for 2018.
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