If you have been following me for any length of time, you know I have been trying to launch a new 3D printed gardending products business. Well, this weekend was my first trade show, and sadly I didn't make a single sale. I had a great space, booth was very attractive and brought a lot of eyes, but I guess not enough for people to pull out their wallets. I guess it either just wasn't my kind of crowd, or I need to make some adjustments.
One thing I did was recalculate my pricing. All of the pricing was based on my older Ender 3 printers which take a lot more time than my Bambu Lab A1 mini. So I recalculated and lowered my prices on the products, hoping that will help. I have the profit margin to do it, so it's not going to be any kind of loss. I am also reconsidering the whole market/trade show thing. For the time and costs wasted, I am probably better off just putting focus into my online presence and instead of paying for markets, try out some Facebook promotion as I had suggested by a few people.
I do have to admit that I have a unique product and that not everyone will get it. But I will say I had a lot of compliments, even from another 3D printing vendor that had little printed collectibles and toys. She said that she was impressed with my stuff and said that she wished she was producing more functional products like mine. So it wasn't all bad, but certainly didn't help my wallet and actually set me back a bit, because I was really needing to make some money to take care of some much needed things like shipping materials and my next show fees. I literally had everything I have into this other than my Hive stake.
But, that's life. To be honest, it felt like a swift, square kick to the balls. The last couple of years have been extremely tough for me in many different ways, and I really needed a win here. So it's been difficult to get over it and I have been down the last couple of days. Like I said in the title of this post, Can't win them all, but one would be real nice right about now. But I am not going to give up, I have what I think is a great concept, just need to find my market.
Until next time...
Be cool, be real, and always abide with you my dudes!