Learning to say no is a skill we picked up late. When we went live with Celeste Naturals at the beginning of last year, “no” wasn’t a word we used. The only time we turned down an event was when two of them landed on the same day and we had to pick. We applied to anything…
Most vendor booth display ideas online come from people photographing a perfect setup, not from people who’ve loaded a tent into a car at 5am for a year. These come from the second group. We’ve been setting up Celeste Naturals at farmers markets, festivals, and a Christkindl market for the better part of a year, and we’ve…
Last week’s post was the spreadsheet half of this decision: revenue, cash flow, outreach, traffic. This is the other half: the benefits of farmers markets that don’t fit in a spreadsheet. I’d rather say it out loud now than discover it after we’ve stepped back and the table’s gone. The customers who come back Plenty of…
I’m writing this between the Georgia Apple Festival and the start of the Christkindl Market, which is an odd time to write about quitting markets. We’re in the busiest stretch of our year for in-person events, and a huge share of our sales comes from them. So let me be clear up front: we’re not…
Our first website did its job in the narrowest possible sense: it existed. It had products, a cart, and a checkout, and nobody ever told us it was bad. That was the problem. Most post-mortems are about something that failed loudly. This one is about something that failed quietly, which turns out to be harder…
At a farmers market, you find out what people think of your products in about four seconds. Someone picks up a bar, smells it, makes a face or doesn’t, and you watch the whole verdict happen in real time. We built a lot of this business on that loop. Wholesale doesn’t work that way, and I…