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glort
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Vcize wrote:
1) I have no idea how much extra stock to bring in addition to my filled out booth. I tend to do largish (24x36) prints on metal so they're expensive to make and I don't want to end up with a storage closet full of extras, but on the flipside the event is 4 straight 12 hour days and I don't want a bunch of wall space sitting empty if stuff is moving either. Obviously it depends on the work, but how much wall-hanging stock (IE not counting small matted prints in bins) typically gets moved at these things?
Never done one so can't give an experienced answer.
What I would suggest however is caution.
I would not be investing in ANYTHING I had to outlay on for a non guaranteed sale. You'll end up getting burnt.
What I would suggest with the larger prints is not delivering them at the festival but rather just taking orders.
Crap on about how the pics are all hand done or custom made and you don't want to risk damage bringing them to the festival where proper packaging is too expensive etc. Tell the people they can order today and their print will be delivered in XX time. Tell them they are limited run, ( you are only going to print as many as you sell aren't you?) whatever adds value to the product.
TRUST ME, Delivering is NOT the key. Sales are. In another thread about onsite and online event sales I mention how I was told onsite printing didn't matter but I didn't think that was right for my market. When it came about I had a problem and couldn't print onsite and just had to take orders, I discovered that the advise was right again and it didn't matter a fig.
Turn this around, don't think its a negative because people will want the prints there and then. Think up reasons why it's better NOT to have the prints there and how them being printed later and sent to the customer is a benefit to them.
To me, doing it any other way is a guarantee you'll get burned.
There is no possible way to predict how many prints you'll sell. None. So what HAS to happen is you either over estimate and blow most of your profits in unslod prints that probably wont sell anywhere else either or you'll inevitably under estimate and still run out or have wall space etc.
Take orders, add a shipping fee, your guaranteed to get everything right and without doubt, You'll also be saying. " I didn't think I'd sell that many of those ones but I was sure that one would walk out the door but I sold none.
2) The festival runs into night time each day. They say we'll have 200w of energy provided for lighting our booth. If we need more I guess we'd need a generator. What are some decent lighting setups that would meet this requirement (my canopy is a standard Caravan pop-up canopy with mesh panels on the back and sides.
They usually say these things but don't check them unless you go overboard. That said, 200W is nothing and wouldn't be hard to work out. You might be able to fudge it a bit but not much.
You could go for those compact or regular florescent's but their light output sucks.
As mentioned, I'd be going for LEDS.
There is a load of ways you could do this.
last week I made up a light panel using 12W Downlights mounted into a board. At just over 100W it's bright enough to take pics with hand held, no problems. You could set something up to go in your tent and with 200W of this sort of light you'd have aircraft trying to land on you.
I paid $12 each for the lights with a plug in transformer. Cheap as chips.
You could also look at LED strip light. I bought a 5M roll of that to put inside the rear of my Truck enclosed cargo area. Brilliant stuff and a few rlls of that plus a suitable power supply would give you a very even and sufficiently bright light. there are different types of LED's in this stuff so get the better, brighter ones ( 5050?).
Also in my recent LED obsession, I bought some 12V car type lights. An LED bar and some round work lights. The bar would be total overkill directly on the prints BUT..... if your tent has a white roof, you could bounce it up there and give a very soft even light to the whole thing and probably attract attention for how bright it was lit. You would need more lighting though and that's were the floods come in.
You can buy 27W floods in batches of 10 for under $15 ea. you could run them off a decent heavy duty battery charger or depending on how long you need to run it, just a battery itself.
If you had 10 of the things, 270w, you could easily run them off a car battery for 4+ hours depending on the battery. If you hooked that battery to a charger and used it to supplement the battery if the charger wouldn't do the load on it's own, you'd get even better endurance.
there are also outdoor type floods which come in a rectangular grey coloured housing with a square Chip,. They come from 10 to 100W but the 10s are by far the best value.
I bought 4 of them 2 nights ago for..... $5 ea for the mains powered models. 8 of them, $40 worth would light your tent again like daylight. You'd just need some power boards and leads and you'd be right.
I always pre wire my booths or tents so I can lay out the boards and cords and tie everything to the length I want it so it fits right up when I get to the site.
For my camping tent, I made a wiring harness years ago. It fits the tent perfectly and has switches just like you have on the wall at home. I put a 12V battery at the side and the thing is lit up like a house. I used to recharge the battery by putting it in the boot of the car and attaching a charging lead which topped it up as I drove around during the day but now I have bought a grunty solar panel, I can throw that on the roof of the tent and have the charge controller on the battery box so it's all automatic. The controller will charge the batteries and give me enough power to run the fridge as well.
Ideally I'd have a chance to walk through one first as a customer, but this thing is once per year so there's not really any opportunity for that this year.
Why not look up where these things will be held in other areas? Go to one of them and see. Often organisers will go from place to place doing them so find out where they will be and drive out and see one. It will be worth the effort.
I remember one gig I picked up I had never done before I drove 12 hours interstate to see.
I prolonged my stay there checking it out for about 15 min and that was all I needed.
May not have been long but it was still worth while. And my daughter and I had a great few days away together.
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| Apr 26, 2016 at 08:46 AM |
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