Delray Beach Delray Marketplace Art & Fine Craft show

I can nearly copy and paste my previous post about the Boca Raton show for this one.

Zero artist amenities: No water for artists unless you paid to rent their tent. No booth sitters, rude staff. No evening before show setup, which means you have to set up starting at 5 am, and I had to go searching for someone to let me know where I would be setting up. No volunteers helping to unload to speed the process.

ONE male, one female bathroom for 150 artists, all located in a coffee shop. Invisible line separating the "art" section from the "craft" section.  Poor attendance due to little publicity. Artist parking was about a half a mile away.

Location was behind a strip mall.  Behind it. As in, not seen unless you are driving by on a side road. Publicity must have been limited to the three small white square signs I saw stuck on the median near the show location. One person mentioned he saw something on television, but he "came to get out of the retirement community for a while, I don't need anything."

The ONE plus I will give this show is that we had plenty of space behind our booth. My neighbors were great and helped watch my booth while I took a bathroom break.

I won't be doing shows with this promotion group again if I can help it -- I just can't drive twelve hours to a show to be treated this badly, whether I have a hole in my schedule or not. It would be time better spent working on filling inventory.

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  • My next show is a HotWorks show. We'll see how it goes!

  • I am a Florida local, grew up in Apopka, Fl. Ancestors are from Trenton, Fl. West of Gainesville. Just cause we are local does not mean we are stupid : ) We locals don't appreciate a bad show either. Last weekend was my worst show ever. Orlando, Fl at Lake Eola. Huge crowd. Very little buying. That said, lots of nice customers who complemented my Art all weekend. Nice neighbors, Vendors. Well organized and advertised show. Other Vendors said last year at this show they made 1700, this year 300. The person was selling small cheap crafts. She was lucky she made that much this year. Pitiful show. Better luck next show : )

  • I'm glad it went better for you, Ruth.

  • Hi Joel

    I was also at this show - just did it as a fill-in.  I just have to correct a couple of your statements.  I don't think the term "strip mall" is accurate.  The location was a pretty typical Florida "marketplace" with retail, lots of restaurants, red tile roofs, fountains, streets - quite new and quite upscale.  The location was described accurately in the application - I googled it to see what it actually looked like before I applied.

    The "invisible line" separatling art from craft looked a lot like a street to me.

    In spite of incredible heat, there were actually shoppers and I was pleasantly surprised by my sales.

  • Maybe they are "pretty wonderful" for Florida locals who are used to such bad treatment, I don't know. I was not impressed by the turnout nor the show. If I had known it was behind a strip mall, I would have just eaten the cost of the show. 

  • Thank you for sharing this critique with us...sounds awful.  I was under the impression that Howard Alan Events were pretty wonderful, this is an eye-opener.

  • It was by Howard Alan Events, Artfestival.com. 

    Bright side, I filled a hole in my schedule, but it cost me two days of driving out of my usual work schedule to do it.

  • who was the promoter?

  • Thanks for the information.  Please name the promoters.  Others have

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