Last Saturday we attended our first farmer's market! We got there at about 8:15 set up. When we were loading the car, it felt nice outside, but once we got to our spot and stayed outside for more than 10 minutes, the wind started hitting, and all we had were a light jackets. I quickly got really cold.
We were set up before the market started at 9. No one came through for the first hour, then a nice lady came to us and tried to buy a whole box! But we didn't have a credit card reader yet (only accepting cash and all the money transfer apps), so we missed our first sale. First big learning of the day!
Shortly after that, it started raining despite no forecast for rain for the day. We almost didn't get a tent to cover us, but the gentleman who runs the market strongly recommended it, so we bought one the night before. Good thing, because it actually rained pretty hard (and it was the first rain at all since Christmas).
Even with the rain, people kept showing up, and we finally got our first sale! Yet again, he would have bought a whole box, but once again needed a credit card for that, so he just paid cash for a few items instead. But we were so so soooo beyond excited to get our first in-person sale!
Over the next few hours we sold to several more people. We had a lot of fun interactions, the other vendors were super kind and helpful, and we had a few friends stop by too. We were freezing, our feet killed us, and we were overall a pretty big mess, especially dealing with our supplies in the rain. But we had a pretty darn good looking table, we got our information out to dozens of people, and we learned so much.
We're going to go back next week with a laundry list of updates. The biggest ones are to have a credit card reader, reorganize our volume discounting (it was a bit confusing to people), and collect emails from people to update them on when we're showing up. We'll also want to be a good partner to the market and promote that we're going on every channel we can.
We'll see if we get any orders this week from people who tried the cookies too!
