11/21/2022
Hi everyone, as you all know, we are a new small business doing well at local arts and crafts shows, holiday events, and at the farmers markets. A few months ago, we learnt about the Christmas Connection show and were encouraged to apply. After seeing the marketing of event, we as a handmade business thought this was ideal for us and decided to be a vendor there this year. While we want to say that we were very much looking forward to being at the Cleveland Christmas Connection Show at the I-X center this year and poured our heart and soul into it, the event didn’t turn out as expected. We experienced a huge failure and loss.
First of all, we were told this Christmas Connection is a strictly handcrafted products only event and that they would extremely carefully vet vendors, but when we got to the event, we saw a lot of China made wholesalers, manufacturers, national brands, Sam’s club, mattress companies, massage chairs, cutlery, kitchen ware, etc that we had to compete against.
Prior to the event, we were told to ramp up our inventory as there will be 1000 people walking per hour in front of our booth and that this is not a neighborhood church event and to scale up. In reality, there weren’t even 100-150 people each hour. There wasn’t anyone in the VIP hours. It takes 2.5 hours to go through first main hall at the entrance. The VIP hours were from 8am to 10am and we had no shoppers or sales in our area. We spent the last few months making tons and tons of inventory worrying that we will be running out but the sales were negligible.
A few of us vendors were placed in a newly expanded hall which we were not aware was a new addition. The event attendees were not aware that there was a completely new hall addition and were thrown off by changes to floor plan. Many didn’t come to the expanded hall at all. The crafters were just a second thought to the event organizers who were driven by profit and for maximizing their revenue. They didn’t plan event logistics, parking, traffic flow in the halls and booths, etc. This made this expanded event a nightmare for us vendors in our area. There was only one opened entrance to the show at the East side of the building (main hall) and there were food courts between the main hall and expanded hall, with exit along the food courts. If people did come to the West entrance closer to the expanded hall, they made them wait in cold and shuttled them to the east entrance. They didn’t open the West gate until later the second day. Most people spent 2.5 hours walking through the booths in the main hall, stopped for eating at the concession stand and left the show before they ever got to our expanded hall and the few that made it to our hall were passing by at that point without making any purchases. Many vendors in our hall didn’t get many sales to recover event fees similar to us.
The event charged us $739 for a 10’x10’ middle booth, plus a $100 more for the new exhibitor marketing package (required) that included two paper signs that we can display at our booth and another $59 for new exhibitor listing (required). Their slogan was “Remember, you are a new exhibitor just once”. Their bare minimum marketing efforts that cost us another $100 was not helpful as it did not do anything to encourage sales.
We were required to arrange a carpet 10’x10’ to cover every inch of our floor. While we followed the rules, spent extra money purchasing the carpet of the right size, there were many vendors without any carpet including the manufacturers, buy and sell and wholesalers. The organizers charged $300-500 plus for carpet/ flooring rental plus cleaning fee. The parking was $10 each day for a regular vehicle even for the vendors parking. Vendors also had to pay $50 for two one way drive-in passes to load your vehicle and drive-in to drop off items in front of your booth. Electricity was another $200 if you were a vendor using a POS system.
There were WiFi blockers that prevented anyone from using their own WiFi. Even those vendors who purchased by spending $300 for exhibitor WiFi couldn’t process their payments. The event was charging vendors and general public $80 per day for accessing internet as none of their WiFi or signal was working to even send any text messages.
The only good part that came out of this event is that we vendors learnt that is is extremely important to know the bad shows even if you aren’t aware of the good ones, so you don’t get burnt. We also made numerous friends with other vendors who shared and supported us through such a disappointing event. We are sharing our experience in the hopes that someone else can learn from it. Thank you.
