Popped up, popped in and popped out.

So it seems like I can only manage to blog once a month currently. I was, very briefly on top of everything - for a day, and by on top of everything, I just mean that I knew what was going on. But somehow now, I have two commissions in discussion, 4 print orders, and messages coming in as I have put my left over pop up shop items up for sale on facebook. I am on top of my architecture work though, just, and on top of my admin, kind of, and I think 'real life' is in check at the moment. So I think that means I am vaguely organised.

Busy, busy! It all makes rather a contrast with when I first started out.

Incidentally, I meant to share on here more information about my London pop up shop. Unfortunately it was only up for a week and has already been and gone. In between working, manning the shop and getting my stock ready I seemed to have slightly failed the marketing test! Nonetheless it wasn't a complete flop, but nor was it a soaring success. I shared the shop with 3 other friends - a photographer and two jewellers, so we had a pretty good variety of stock, the shop, in fact, looked pretty good. the downside was the lack of footfall, although what footfall we had had a good rate of purchase.

I think I learnt some valuable lessons though:

1. Choose where you locate carefully, I don't think the area we were in was particularly suited to my style of work.
2. Price is important. I was told too many times that I was selling everything too cheaply. 
3. Marketing is everything.
4. Be gregarious - I need to be more willing to talk about my work and sell my ideas. 
5. Local is better. It would have been much easier for me to get people in my local area to visit my shop and it would also have been considerably easier not to have taken my stock (by foot!) into London.
6. Music! Have music on in the background to avoid 'rushing in and rushing out shop syndrome'! 
7. Do some fake browsing. People are always more likely to come in if it looks like there are already people in the shop. 

So the jury is out currently on whether I will do another one of these or not. There is a shop in Maidenhead that might sell some of my stock so that seems like a good avenue to explore to start with. It also seems, art wise, that a personal exhibition may be more successful than a shop, at least whilst I am trying to become a 'known' entity.

Marketing is tough.