Nicolette’s Design Diary

Shows are a great place to observe human behavior. My old consumer psychology professor would love to observe the various behaviors that people exhibit while they’re at a craft show. One of the things that I do at a show is keep count of how many people visit my booth. I have one of those little crowd counter clickers to help keep a running tally and record traffic hourly each day of the show. Traffic counts is one of those little tools that help me judge the overall value of a show and the effectiveness of my display, and I’ve found it to be pretty useful since I’ve first started doing it last year.

The problem with counting traffic is that people don’t always come straight in and straight out of your booth. In fact there’s an amazing range of approaches that people take while touring booths at a show. People aren’t actually crossing the threshold, but they are clearly looking. We’ve actually had to sort of classify the different types of approaches and make rules about whether we count them or not. No matter how many shows we do and no matter where we are, the approaches appear to be about the same.

The Lean In- This is where a person stands right at the edge the booth and leans forward to see what in it. We count these since they’re clearly looking at what’s in the booth.

The Walk-By- This is where a person views the booth while still walking by it. Typically a person will slow down enough so they can see the booth, sometimes they almost come to a stand still, but they never completely stop. Generally, they walk slowly by, even craning their necks around to get a last look before they completely pass the booth. Some people are practically walking by while looking over their shoulders. A couple times we’ve seen collisions as a result people not watching where they were going.

The Fish Tail- This is one my mom first noticed. In this approach, a person kind of slowly inches toward your booth from one side, and once they reach the edge of the booth, they dart away into the aisle. Kind of like the way fish swim toward you and then suddenly dart away in the other direction.

The Peek-Around- In this case, a person is at the edge of booth next to you and they kind of crane their body around to take a peek into your booth. This is one that I see a lot of men doing. Their wives are shopping in the booth next to you, they’re kind of bored, so they’re looking around without actually leaving the neighboring booth. We’ve seen people twist themselves into some pretty funny positions in this particular approach.

The Long Distance- This isn’t actually an approach, but we’ve seen it so often I have to include it. This is when a person stands in the middle of the aisle and try to peer into your booth from a distance. For a while we weren’t sure that people were actually looking a what’s in the booth, I mean after all, how can you get a good look a jewelry from in the middle of an aisle? One day we saw a guy standing in the middle of the aisle staring into the booth. He stood there for a good 2 to 3 minutes then he walked away. A few minutes later he came back with his wife and said, “Look at these earrings, they’re made out of paper, aren’t they neat?” He had actually read the sign about my Paper Bead Jewelry from the middle of the aisle!

[tags] jewelry, craft shows [/tags]

No matter how many shows you’ve done in the past, you almost always encounter a bit of rustiness at your first show of the year…especially if you’ve spent the first part of the year locked up in your studio. I had planned a number of new things for 2006, new products, new newsletter, new booth display. I had literally locked myself in my studio for the past two weeks trying to get everything prepared for the first show of the season. And no matter how early you start or how many all nighters you pull, you’re never as prepared as you like. By the time I was ready as I was ever going to be, I was desperate to be anywhere instead of my studio.

Set-up is on Thursday, so Wednesday night, my assistant (otherwise known as Mom) and I spend about an hour trying to cram everything in the pickup truck we use to transport my booth and products. A process that usually took 15 minutes…20 minutes tops took us about an hour. A brand new booth, more products, a suitcase full of clothes to last two weeks, and the fact that I only got about 5 hours of sleep that whole week forced us to reinvent the way we packed our truck. After much packing and repacking and a good many curses, we finally shove the last box in the over-stuffed truck and totter off to bed to get some rest for the four hour trip the next morning.

At 4:00 a.m., we get rise, get dressed, bundle in the truck and pull out of Richmond, VA hoping to miss the predictably bad D.C. morning traffic. We don’t miss it entirely, but manage to only be delayed for about 30 minutes, making the several hours of missed sleep to be worthwhile…mostly. The whole trip from Virginia to Philly was mostly smooth due to Mom’s latest gadget, a portable GPS. Mom had called me about two weeks before the show and told me that she had finally gotten a portable GPS for the truck. She had spoke off and on about getting one last year while I was drawing up this year’s schedule.

For those of you who don’t know what a GPS is, it’s short for Global Positioning System (if you already knew that, skip this part). Basically, the GPS sends a signal to a satellite, the satellite figures out where you are based on where on the planet the signal is coming from, and sends back instructions on how to get from your current location to whatever location you key into the system. I’m normally a person who likes gadgets, but the prospect of Mom’s new GPS didn’t really excite me. And I was even a bit appalled when she told me how much it cost. I knew what it was, but I’m the type of gal that has no fear of maps and believe that you’ll never get lost as long as you knew where North, South, East, and West is and have a decent map. That’s what I thought before the GPS re-routed us around a 6 mile back up on the Capital Beltway, guided us to the Expo Center in Fort Washington without scrambling to find a missed street, and directed us to the closest Lowe’s after we discovered in the middle of setup that I had left the surge protectors in the box of stuff we decided to leave in Richmond because we could no longer fit anything else in the truck.

Having the GPS was like having that friend who knows how to get everywhere sitting in your car and tell exactly where to go… “In 1 mile turn left on Commerce Street. In two miles turn right on Virginia Drive.” There’s also no guessing about how far a mile is because the system counts down the distance between steps and reminds of your turn just before you reach it. Make a wrong turn? The system recalculates a new route and gets you back on track. The niftest thing is the fact that the GPS is also programmed to find the closet restaurant, gas station, or shopping center in relation to your current position. No stopping and asking somebody where the closest Wal-Mart or Outback Steakhouse is. Press a few buttons and you have your route all laid out for you. All I have to say is that if you’re far from home in a strange town, a portable GPS can save you a pile of time driving time, gas, and aggravation…that is if you program the thing right. Because even the most wonderful gadget has it’s hitches…mostly caused by the person using it.

The trip had gone smoothly until we got off the exit into Fort Washington. Next the GPS (whom by that time we had nicknamed Genni), directed us off of a main road into a series of small residential streets. For the next 15 minutes we traveled through a maze of residential neighborhoods, each road becoming smaller than the next. When the GPS finally directed us through an apartment building parking lot, we finally decided to pull over to find out what the hell was going on. Everything was smooth until we embarked on the guided tour of the neighborhoods of Fort Washington. After a bit of fiddling with the settings, we found out that we had set the GPS to avoid major roads. So instead of taking the handiest road to the Expo Center, we were being guided down every gravel road and lane in order to avoid major roads! We switched the setting and was guided to the Expo Center without a further hitch, having a good laugh about the situation on the way. I was almost tempted to keep the setting just to see if the GPS could guide us to our destination without taking major roads, but after a four-hour drive, the curiosity was merely academic.

Finally we pulled into the Expo Center, and commenced with set-up. Again, this was a process that last year we had gotten down to a science, 30 to 45 minutes tops. At least that was the process before:

No so with the brand new booth:

Aside from being a lot more professional looking it also was a bit more complicated to set up, stretching our down to a science set up time from 45 minutes to 2 hours, figuring out how to set up the electrical wires, how to assemble the new glass cases and altering the floor plan after we found out that we’re now on a corner instead of being in a middle of an aisle as set up map indicated. But despite the added set-up time, by the mid-afternoon, we had everything mostly in it’s final configuration, and head off to the hotel to relax for the big day tomorrow.

[tags] jewelry, GPS, craft shows [/tags]