My First Pop-Up Market
My first pop-up
On Tuesday, 10th September, I hosted my first ever pop-up market. I was accompanied by my sister (@batterandbeyond) as my glamorous assistant for the day. It was a wonderful challenge that I was so excited to take on, and thankfully the day was pretty much a success. If you’re interested in how it went, please keep on reading.
Before the market/prep
I’ll say this, you may think you know what goes into a market, but the reality of it is so much more. Display cases, payment methods, branding, and so much more. The admin of it all as well was very involved.
Deciding on what to serve at the market and the quantities was the hardest thing – it’s like a seesaw: you don’t want to make too much product, but you also want to have a good variety of items, but you don’t want to make too little that it is not cost-effective (labour is one of the biggest expenses).
We finally set on a product list and got cracking; even this took longer than expected due to a last-minute menu swap. However, we settled on Brownies, Blondies, NYC cookies and Sprinkle cake.
I won’t lie, getting everything cooked and ready was STRESSFUL; long days, late nights, self-doubt etc; my body still aches! I did not utilise baking and freezing as I did not feel comfortable selling pre-frozen bakes (no judgement to others, it was just my preference and wanted to allow customers to take away, and they may freeze for themselves).
The Friday before is when everything kicked off, prepping and baking across the weekend into Monday to get all the baked goods ready for Tuesday.
I nearly quit 5 times during the process, imposter syndrome and lack of sleep will do that to you.
However, special shoutout to my family: my sister for keeping me on track; my parents for letting me commandeer the dining room/kitchen for 4 days 😊
Day of the market
The day did not start off as planned. We left on time, and a journey that should’ve taken 20 minutes took 40 minutes. Once we finally made it to the event space, we ended up being stuck in the building because the entrance we were told to use was locked, so we were left in a dark corridor with no phone signal. It eventually took 30 minutes just to make it to the reception area. Several trips to the car and a lot of stress later, we finally were set up for the market. I can laugh about it now because it was so comical, but obviously at the time it was very stressful which led to us starting the set-up a little later than planned and in all the chaos it resulted in us not being able to take any photos or videos of the stall or set up. However, my friend was a hero and took a couple pics for us.
Lots of people came down to see the stall, and then more came down after recommendations from other customers which at one point created a serious rush of purchases which was awesome but a bit manic (as mentioned, due to the late set-up we did not have a proper production line to deal with customers) so a third person would have been a real help. I don’t know how people do markets on their own; we struggled with the two of us, and I could not have done this without my sister’s help.
Overall, the market was a success (we made over £500 in sales), I’m happy I did it, and feel much more prepared to do this again. This has been a huge learning experience, and I have taken so much away from this opportunity that I can implement in the next market I do (they’ve already asked me back, which is another tick in the success column a-woo-hoo!)
I’m thinking of creating a guide on the ins and outs of preparing for a market; let me know if you are interested and for those that have made it this far, thanks for reading.
Sheni
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