Well... Last Sunday was no exception. I was hoping for a rather cool day to have our 3rd pop-up shop at Rose bowl Flea Market... but as soon as the sun came up, it became a very very hot day!
Last month we had our shop in front of the main gate at the Rose Bowl. We had a great stream of traffic throughout the day and an amazing result. (blog post here.) This round... I decided to try out something new and pop our baum-kuchen shop in the antique section to see if we have slower but more relaxed traffic through our booth. I guess I didn't do enough research about which aisle I was signing up for...
My sister Yuko and I started setting up the booth around 5:30am on Sunday morning and we were done and ready for customers by 8am... only to realize that there was no other booth around us except a lady selling second hand clothes from her mini van next door. Somehow both Yuko and I knew that we were facing an up-hill challenge. We were not only towards the very end of the antique area where traffic is little scarce... but also in a middle of a very vacant aisle.
You know... I am a designer and I believe in the power of design and how it can change many things... so we stayed positive throughout the morning... adjusting the shop layout more than few times to see if we could catch more attention from people who were walking on the main aisle. Unfortunately... NOTHING worked! There were barely a handful of people who came in our aisle and maybe 3 groups of people whom we talked to... even though there were thousands of people who were in the market searching for something cool to take home with!
It was definitely bad... especially because we knew the potential of this market from last month...
By 1pm, the heatwave became absolutely unbearable and Yuko and I made an executive decision to close the shop and head out for cold water and much needed food.
I was really disappointed. Mainly disappointed because of my lack of foresight in getting the "right spot"... sigh...
It took me a little while to recover from this experience but I am definitely going to try for another round of pop-up shop at Rose Bowl again! I am curious to see how different location works for our shop... and I am on the mission to find THE perfect spot! Next month, I got a little spot not too far from where we were but actually facing towards the main traffic. In the long run... We will see... I would love to understand not only what works but also the "why"...
Stay tuned:)
