Today was the first of 2 days of the Sun City wide festival for all the crafts clubs to display and market their wares to a large crowd of people anxious to purchase wonderful and interesting items at reasonable prices. We've had to wait two years for it because of covid. You might have guessed that this, being Arizona with masks being optional, had perhaps as many people as one in twenty present wearing masks. (Raises hand.)
The last two weeks were concentrated work in getting ready for it. Let me clarify that most of us prepare all year, learning skills and making jewelry for our on-site little store. But things ramped up. All the store jewelry had to be cleaned for showing. Silver tarnishes quickly here. Sulphur in the air is blamed. Choices need to be made as to which of your selections are going, unless you haven't yet made more than will fit on two trays for optimal display of each piece. Of course, we have "fake neck" stands for special necklaces, round bars on stands to hold bracelets, ring boxes, and 5 different rotating earring cases as well for the whole club, so every pair of earrings in the store got sent. A few mirrors are also strategically placed so customers can see how wonderful something looks on them. Or whatever it is they think they see in those things. We're hoping they see dollar signs.
Committees were set up for taking everything to the festival, and hauling back and putting away whatever was left. Tables and electric cords came with your club's space, along with publicity, announcers, parking, golf carts to shuttle customers to and from parking. Vendors were selected to sell foods and beverages outside the building, with only water allowed inside. The clubs provide their own decorative table covers, plus sheets to cover the merchandise during closed hours when the building is locked. Excess of everything is stored under those tables behind their cloths, whether it is extra jewelry to fill in emptying trays, or boxes/bags for sold items, tools for emergency repairs, etc. Somebody even located a bandaid for a customer this morning! Inside the big rectangle of display tables are two small card tables, with space to walk around each. One holds the cash register which works on wi-fi plus whatever else in needed at that spot, the other table holds decorative boxes and bags for sold items, and a pair of boxes full of cards.
That's my preferred job, working with those cards. It is all done from a chair.
When I say "cards", I refer to the large index type cards which each member fills out for each submitted piece of jewelry they wish to sell. Weeks or even years earlier a committee goes through those decide by a defined set of standards which have the quality to be sold in the club store. It's never about style; that's between the "artist" and the customer. Cards are all filed, first by the number each person is given by the Rec Center membership. Then they are filed in order of when they were made, starting with #001 and going as high as necessary. There is an annual limit, enforced by a limit of ten items twice a month. Some are in the 700s now. Each jewelry item has an attached tag with those two numbers and the sale price. Cards also give information on metals and stones used, what kind of item it is, and whatever else the seller needs to identify item 203 from 437 when they're made of the same materials and both are, say, necklaces.
As soon as a sale is completed, the number/price tag is removed. That tag goes to the other table to be matched with its proper card, the tag is taped onto the card, the card is dated and the sale price noted, and it goes into a large plastic envelope with a velcro fastening.
It's seldom that simple of course. Tags get ripped, writing gets blurred from a drop of water even if it was legible in the first place. No guarantees there either. As soon as they learn they can do it, the sales staff will bring a piece of jewelry to you asking what stone or metal is in it. Customers want to know if they should be impressed enough to buy it I guess. The card has to be pulled to get the answer. It can be educational finding out. One indeterminate stone this morning was a white jade with a wisp of purple floating through it. Another that looked very similar was declared by the maker to be some exotic kind of agate. Some I recognized, like malachite which is the only thing that looks like malachite. Sometimes it was even something I'd made - recently enough to be sure of what I'd used. And on a good day I can bring up the name promptly. I had "aquamarine" nailed!
I held down that chair for 4 hours this morning. As tags went through, I noticed that the usual suspects were the ones doing the most selling. Two stood out. The first was a woman I've seen in the club for two years who never submitted anything. Until two weeks ago, when I'd commented that I thought her stuff would easily sell and encouraged her to submit some. Of her 9 items, 3 already sold in those 4 hours. I informed her when she showed up just before I left. I was tickled for her.
The other surprise was me. My numbers kept coming through. I had hopes of good sales this time, unlike other years, since I was now working in sterling, and making somewhat conservative items. The surprise was in what was selling - mostly stuff that had been unsold for the last 3 years! Lots of colored wires, an abundance of large seed beads, styles unique to me within the club. That included celtic braided wire bracelets and earrings, and the multi-level wire "flowers" that my color choices turned into either poinsettias or stars, whether for earings, pendants, or tree ornaments. Tis the season! As one woman said as she dropped off yet another of my tags (recognizing my style), apparently funky is back in this year. Styles had suddenly reversed. She was cheering me on, after several years of modest sales.
She is one of our premier jewelry designers, always sterling, and head of our selection committee. She worked for months to figure out how to turn a single piece of square wire into a coffee cup with steam rising from it, then hung on ear wires. Customers eagerly pay $35 for a pair of those! She freely admits they are paying for all those months of work and all the wire she had to throw away when it wasn't right. She has never taught it, nor do I expect she ever will. She's justifiably proud of it and keeps its secrets, other than saying the trick is finding exactly where you have to start - the only way it works. I had seen only a couple of her items come through, and tried not to feel sorry for her since she usually sells like crazy. Especially when she made a point of looking up my overflow items and filling display trays back up with them.
I happen to be of the persuasion that once I figure out a new-to-me skill, I should pass it along by showing others. Even more so if it's something that made me lie awake nights trying to figure out how to put it together. It's how the club works. It's how I learned. My newest technique will be done as a workshop in early December. I've gotten requests to show wire poinsettias again too, but will have to see how much else I need to get done as well, and how much I recall of the finer points after two years or more. I can practically do them in my sleep - some nights I think I do - but the teaching part is rusty. And we'll have to see about celtic wire braiding again. Haven't done that one for over two years either.
There were frustrations as well, aside from illegible numbers on some tags. I had made a point of going through those boxes of cards recently and making sure that they were in order. It took large parts of two days in the club, since besides organizing them, I notified members of irregularities in individual cards that they needed to come in and correct. I expect you now believe the cards were still in order? LOL. I had to pull whole sections out and reorganize them, full stop to everything else, because three different sets of cards were shuffled in with each other, all out of order internally to boot. Even mine were jumbled around. If we can't locate the proper card, matching the numbers we sort by, we have to make a duplicate. As well as we can with very little information, anyway. At the very least we write "duplicate" on a blank card, tape the tag to it, and send it through for the treasurer's headache on Sunday when she tries to figure out how big the checks are and going to whom.
There was also the lost tag. I had to locate it. Fortunately, I watched it fall from the cashier's fingers down onto the card file box on the left, landing somewhere in about a 4" wide section of cards, and vanish. After making sure it hadn't landed on the table or floor, I pulled out that entire section plus a batch in each direction, and flipped through them one at a time looking for a piece of folded paper about 1" by 1/2". It took about 15 minutes. We were already late enough in the morning that all the paper I was dealing with had drawn all the skin oils from my fingers and I had to use my fingernails to separate cards. (Guess what I had trimmed down in the car just before I got out this morning?) Between the mask and a clean forehead and nose, there was nothing to make my fingertips stickier. I certainly wasn't going to pull of the mask and lick my fingers! I mean, at home, sure. But here....
My relief was a brand new member, so I got to spend about 15 minutes training her in right on doing the job. We had several tags to go through, and I spent some extra time on how to deal with the unusual. Once done with that, I spend a few minutes doing my own festival shopping. Many years that meant kitchen towels or pot holders, since they get dirty so quick and I hate the big store offerings. This year I found things for other people that weren't jewelry, and no, I'm not telling! Some of you read this! Or at least claim to.
Tomorrow I go back in to do it again. A shift is at least two hours, and the person assigned to follow me set her time up with mine so I could train her in. She also will be training in as club secretary for next year, incidentally. I'm not thinking I'm likely to shop afterwards this time, but probably will go around and see if more of my stuff (and others') needs to go on display. If we're still selling as well as this morning, we're going to have lots of spaces to fill. I'm particularly interested in seeing how one member's squash blossom necklaces are selling. She just missed the deadline for submission but they are so spectacular that we waived that particular rule and stayed late that day to "jury" her pieces. (Shhh! Don't tell. Other people will think they can get away with it too.)
Oh, BTW I'm not stepping down as secretary because I got tired of the job. I still very much like the job. But officers have been hard to find the last couple of years, for obvious reasons since actual club members coming in to work also have been sparse. Burnout among officers is high. New volunteer officers are hard to find. We had one new person willing to step up, but only as secretary. Two current officers are keeping their same positions, and I'm one of two willing to take on a different one. So come January 1, I'll be president. It'll only be 6 times the work.
Good thing much of my jewelry can be made at home in front of the TV!
No comments:
Post a Comment