As many of you would have noticed (we hardly kept it quiet) last week we packed up our ‘Home Counties’ and took them up to Birmingham to show them off at the Spring Fair. Having never even visited a trade show before, let alone exhibited we had lots to learn, and quickly! Here’s how it went…
the build-up
We found out we’d secured our stand back in December, whilst we were in the midst of the craziest and busiest few months of our lives, and rather naively didn’t give it much of a second thought until 2019 rolled around. Suddenly we found ourselves with a month to go and nothing prepared! Cue the sleepless nights…
We knew we wanted to tweak our packaging to help our products stand out on shop shelves and also knew we’d need a professional looking trade brochure for the event, as well as design and build a stand - we had a lot to do! So we called in the professionals.
Wright Obara did the most fantastic job of taking our current packaging and tweaking it to stay on brand but tell a beautiful story, by giving each of our scents its own unique design. They also created a stunning, emotive trade brochure which brings our story to life whilst including all the important information retailers need to know about stocking our products. Not only that, they re-shot all of our product photography - no mean feat when we have 19 different scents, each in candle, reed diffuser and 3 wick!
Greenfield Projects then worked with Oli to design and build a stand which not only fit the exact requirements for space and shelving etc., but was perfectly on brand - rustic, sustainable (made entirely from used pallets), clean and simple.
We wouldn’t have been able to do it without the help of the pros - and we promise next time we’ll give them more notice (shout out to the courier who delivered our new box sleeves the day before the show - driving to us from Hampshire in the snow)!
show time
From the minute we arrived at the NEC we were excited and a little overwhelmed at the scale of what we were involved in! Some stands looked like they’d taken weeks to build and we were amongst the likes of Sophie Allport, Nkuku and Baylis and Harding. Whilst a little daunted, as soon as the doors opened on Sunday morning we were in our element. We love nothing more than talking to people about our story and our products (apologies to our family and friends that this is all we ever talk about!), so thank you to every single person who stopped to talk to us!
And thank you even more to those retailers who placed orders with us - we are so excited to see our products pop up in Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Kent, Surrey, Somerset, Bucks & Beds! Details about each of our new stockists will be popping up on our feed shortly, so keep your eyes peeled.
what next?
More than anything we have come away from the Spring Fair totally and utterly inspired. From the free talks we attended on everything from Google Shopping to PR, to the other incredible small businesses we met (shout out to the most inspiring, our neighbours Kate of Kensington), we’re absolutely motivated to work harder and grow our little business as much as possible.
And with inspiration come ideas - we’ve come away with a list of 18 blog post ideas (I apologise now - more rambling to come) and we’re already experimenting with 3 new ‘counties’ - watch this space!
