Pineapple pop-up

So, having finally made it to the last week before Christmas, the time had come to set up my pop up all for myself.

This event had been in the diary since the beginning of December, so one of the longest anticipated events in our calendar. Despite this, and despite several planning sessions, I had not actually worked out what the heck I was going to do.

Keep in mind that, until now, I had filled exactly one table by myself, and that had been a card table. Plus, the frames I had desperately needed at the end of November had still not arrived, so I had about six purses left. To make matters worse, I was ill, and could not have cared less about anything that took me away from my duvet, and my last day of work before starting my Christmas holiday just would not stop.

So, having thankfully persuaded my SO to drive me around, I half heartedly grabbed everything I could think of to create a table display, threw it in the car, and turned the Christmas music up to distract me from just how much I wanted to be in bed. I had forgotten to cut myself a new, bigger strip of hessian from the roll at my mum’s house, so the one thing I did have on my plan (the tablecloth) was not sorted before I left the house.

So, when I got there, I had to fudge it.

I had taken with me:

• An old sheet used for decorating
• A folded piece of green denim that I’ve not yet got to making into jeans
• Three pretty old books
• One lamp that doesn’t actually turn on
• The bag of stuff I usually take to Christmas markets
• My sign
• Stock
• A frame (with a hastily constructed cardboard leg) to display an open purse
• A few pine cones that I had borrowed from Ali
• A string of battery operated Christmas lights

In the end, I think it worked out alright. The green fabric was sufficiently large that it covered the table and hid the empty under table space. The three books, I lay out across the centre of the table and propped the purses against it. I leant my sign against the wall because I’d not got as far as working out how to make it stand independently. I put the lamp on the left corner, and the purse in a frame on the right, and laid everything else out on the table to make it look a little fuller.

However surprisingly well my set up looked, though, it didn’t actually help me sell anything. I sold absolutely nothing throughout the three day pop up.

I stopped by for a couple of hours on the final day, and I have a fairly good idea why. First of all, I chatted with the woman running it. She was able to feed back to me some of the things that customers had said – mostly that the purses cost more than the customers were planning to spend while they were there. This probably says something about the area – Thatcham is not exactly the most affluent area – but I don’t think that was actually the most significant factor. Having sat in the shop for several hours, having looked at the other stuff available and talked to the ladies running it that day about how things had gone, most of all, I think it was timing.

People were looking for last minute gifts – stocking fillers for kids, supplementary gifts to go along side a big gift. The things that sold were £1-5, cheap and frivolous. Basically, tat. My purses are not tat. They are not priced as tat, and the idea of them being given as tat gifts makes me shudder. So, it doesn’t actually surprise me that as we got closer to Christmas, my purses did less and less well.

So, while it’s disappointing, it is not the end of the world. I have revisited my pricing a little bit, but overall, I’m reconciled.