Hopes For The Market

Tomorrow is "Children In The Garden" day at the Gardeners' Market. Since Bagel is still in my tummy and shows no sign of coming out in the near future, I'm planning on being there. M had the opportunity to earn some big bucks this weekend, so my teenage brother Little D is helping me out. (Favorite Husband doesn't think much of Little D's people skills or money skills, so maybe this would be a good opportunity for him to develop some.)

At first, when I heard about it, this children's day at the market sounded like just another "theme" day. We had "Flower Day" a while back and it was just like any other day at the market. But I think this one will be different. There will be a petting zoo, for one thing. They are advertising it on the conservative talk radio station as well as the NPR station. Tiny Princess got a card in the mail telling her about a booth there where she can earn a Girl Scout badge. I think it's going to be VERY crowded, with many vendors. I'm going to have to pick up Little D at 6:45 a.m. to go set up for our 8:00 start, just to make sure we get a space. It's looking more and more like this weekend has the potential to be like Memorial Day weekend, when we brought in some serious revenues and M entirely ran out of recycled-yarn socks.

I'm pretty comfortable with the amount of merchandise I have, although I would have liked to have made more of those Addison Hats in a variety of fibers and colors. But I have bags and plenty of hot mitts, and by this evening I think I'll have enough dish scrubbers. I have a bunch of children's toy hot mitts, our promotional item for the special occasion (free kid's mitt with $10 purchase).

I have two experimental dish scrubber designs: a turtle in green organic cotton, and a sun in yellow cotton (the sun was T.P.'s idea). I thought I'd put them out to see how much attention they get, but I haven't decided on a price for them yet, so I guess I'd better get cracking on that. I was thinking I might charge just a bit more than the regular scrubbers. The only problem with that is that I'd been hoping to run a free-scrubber promotion in the future, and I'd like to keep it simple and not have to explain to everyone that the free scrubbers are limited to the rectangular ones. I was also thinking of running a sale for 4th of July weekend (if I'm there...) on all red, white, and blue items, but I wasn't sure if the natural organic cotton should count as white. The price of the organic yarn just went up by 20%, so I'm loath to sell those items for less. But I just found a way to order the colored yarns directly from the manufacturer, so the price of that yarn has effectively gone down. OTOH I don't sell much, if any, of the colored yarn stuff at the market; I mostly sell it to my mom.

Any input on the subject of promotions from my two blog readers would be welcome.