My other half and I have always had a dream of setting up our own business. Both of our respective parents have ran their own businesses so I guess it is in our blood somewhere to give it a go.
Last year I thought I'd try the home party route to test the waters. I picked an established but different company to promote their products. It didn't go quite as well as I hoped on the party front as people generally wanted the product now and not wait 2 weeks for delivery. Once I was even told by the company that an item wouldn't be back in stock for one of my customers until after Christmas. Not good business.
After our first couple of times trying to promote the parties at Christmas Fayres we realised parties weren't what people wanted but the items, here and now. So we decided to do a bit of research and found that we could source similar items ourselves and cut out the middleman. We bought a small amount of our own stock to sell alongside the parties and we found that more sales came from the items that we had chosen, and customers could take away there and then, as apposed to the party products. Needless to say I didn't continue with the party company after Christmas.
Since then we have mostly left things on the back burner this year, until recently when the flame ignited again. Our first stop, The Autumn Fair 2014 at the NEC.
We went with an open mind to source companies and suppliers to make our idea a reality, and boy do my head and feet hurt now! So many companies! I wore my fitness tracker to see just how far we would walk and we were surprised to find out that we walked 3.9miles, and we hadn't really covered half of the halls!
However we did find products we thought we could use and that we both liked, something that is very important to us! We spoke to potential suppliers and explained our idea which seemed to go down well. We picked up lots of business cards and brochures as well as important and useful information. We even handed out our homemade business cards (gift tags with our details on!) which got lots of good comments and will hopefully make us memorable.
It was a good but tiring day. Definitely worth it though!
I can't wait to start putting things into place and launch our own business!