On Saturday October 1st I attended the Open Day of “Villa van Alles” (Villa odds and ends) in the Dutch village Rhoon. Villa van Alles is a building where several (creative) entrepreneurs are located. For the Open Day, they’ve decided to also invite other entrepreneurs from the region.
My goals
My main goal was to see how people in “real life” would respond to the Crea Bea Cards concept. Since Crea Bea Cards is a blog, I’m used to receiving responses online, so this was something new.. and a bit scary, haha! 😉 The second goal was to get inspired by people, because they look at the concept from a different point of view. The third goal (but not mandatory) was to see if I could maybe sell a few of my handmade greeting cards. That would be really awesome!
Preparations
About 2 weeks before the Open Day, I signed up for a booth. It made me wonder: what do I want to show the visitors? What do I need for that? I made several lists and drawings of the possible equipment I would need for the booth.
In the first weekend I visited several stores and gathered the equipment bit by bit, which was really fun! Online I ordered colorful envelops, because I wanted visitors to pick their favorite color to accompany the purchased greeting card. I made a selection of 5 different greeting cards and crafted about 5 to 10 pieces of each kind.
The evening before the Open Day, I built up the booth at home to practise and see if the result looked nice. This really is handy thing to do if you never had a booth before.
The Open Day
The moment was finally there. In the early morning I packed all my things (in backpack & suitcase) and traveled to Rhoon. Together with my sister I built up the booth in Villa van Alles (Villa odds and ends). My sister helped me the whole day, that’s so sweet of her!
When the event started I felt a bit nervous at first. During the day, that feeling disappeared 🙂 Not many people attended the event, but the people that dropped by and took a look at my booth, were very enthousiastic. They said the greeting cards look pretty. Some shared their experience with card making and wondered if I host workshops. I’ve sold 7 greeting cards (hurray!) in total and “lost” quite some business cards to visitors and the manager of Villa van Alles (to display in her hobby store).
Among the visitors were also a friend and family members. I wasn’t sure if my family would come, so that was a really nice surprise. Overall, I’m very happy with the result! 😀 Thank you all for this wonderful day!
