Taste of Stowe:Day 3 (Overall Review)

This weekend, I attended the Taste of Stowe show in Stowe, Vermont. The show lasted three days and, for the most part, the weather was good. Nice and sunny, without being too hot or humid on all of the days. There were brief showers on Friday (the first day) that started at the end of the day. However, since I was under a large tent, my stuff didn't seem to have any problems getting rained on.

The crowds, for the most part, were not that large. Friday, to be expected, the day was slow and, although a steady stream, not a large number of people. This is to be expected since it was a work day and most of the crowd would have been retired people or tourists. I was hoping for a much larger crowd on Saturday and Sunday, but that didn't seem to happen. On both days, there were definitely more people, but they were, what I like to call, "tire kickers". A lot of them would come into the booth, look around, and then leave. This seem to happen to a number of the other 2D artists also. Now, in certain cases, they definitely seem to be buying prints, but not a lot of larger items. Several of the other artists around me had good luck and secure some decent sales (enough to make booth fee and some extra). I only know of one instance in which a person made a really nice sale on an extremely large painting. Other than that, the sense that I got from a lot of the other artists was that they didn't do well (like me) or just did okay.... nothing special.

As usual, a number of people commented on my booth and the vivid colors of my paintings. I showed them my pen/ink work in my sketchbook and the process that I go through to create a painting. A lot of them loved the sketch book and wondered why I didn't also sell the drawings. For the most part, people would come into my booth, look around, gush over how gorgeous and unique my paintings were, and then leave. Some promised to come back, but, as many other vendors know, this rarely happens.

In essence, the people who were attending the show were not my target audience (25 - 40 year old couples). The artists who did sell a lot of work produced nice paintings of traditional landscape/recognizable buildings of the surrounding Stowe area. Most people seem to gravitate towards the traditional landscape or definite Vermont-style photographs/paintings.

Setup and break-down went pretty fast and presented no issues. I did run into an issue with one of my painting titles (Rainbow Bridge). This upset several people and they couldn't bring themselves to purchase the print or the original. Therefore, I had to rename it "Back to Nature" to help with the selling of the print/painting (although, neither one sold after those incidents).