After 6 years of applying we were finally accepted. YES!!! We had heard great things about this festival and were excited to finally be participating.
Edmonds is a suburb about 10 miles north of downtown Seattle with some very affluent neighborhoods that we pass on our way to the park. The festival is sponsored by the Edmonds Art Foundation and is always held Father’s Day weekend. Edmonds is located on the Puget Sound and the Field has a nice view of the Sound and the Olympic Mountains. The festival has 2 sections for artists booth, the Field with about 200 booths and the Plaza with another 40 or so booths. The Plaza is more traditional arts and crafts including soap, food products, beaded jewelers, etc. The Field is intended to be more Fine Art. There were a few booths on the Plaza that had me wondering why they weren’t on the Field and vice versa, not sure it’s really clear to most of the attendees either. The show is run with mostly volunteer support and they do a great job with communication before and during the show. Overall quality of art at the show was very good, I didn’t see anything that was obvious buy / sell and got the chance to talk with artists around us who travel more extensively for some of the bigger national shows. The show seemed well balanced and I judge that by the fact that not once all weekend did I hear the comment “oh, another jewelry booth”.
Artist amenities include breakfast and coffee each morning, artist dinner on Saturday evening, booth sitters and free RV parking a couple of blocks from the festival. Warning, steep uphill from the artist parking to the festival, not fun to be pushing anything heavy from your vehicle. Load in was fairly simple, structured in 4 different time slots throughout the day on Thursday. Load out, well, it was organized, if people would follow directions and be courteous, but it’s a tight fit to get the vehicles in and it’s a long wait to get your vehicle in. You had the option to dolly out, but parking around the Field was scarce and the field was damp enough that the soil was very soft so plan on a good workout if you want to dolly out. The show ended at 6 PM on Sunday and by the time we got the truck onto the Field, loaded and packed, we were pulling out of the Field at 8:30 PM, about twice our normal load out time. So, be patient and bring a book (or in our case our Kindles). Artist check out (this is a commission show) wasn’t as well organized as other shows we’ve participated in, signage and directions on which line to be in if you were paying with cash, check or charge was not clear, so that also slowed down the load out process. Booth fees were $150, plus $100 for a corner and more for a 10x15 or 10x20, plus a 15% commission on all sales.
Show hours are fairly long, 10-8 on Friday and Saturday, 10-6 on Sunday, so by the end of the weekend, we were sleep deprived. As jewelers, we take our products home each night and have to put them all out again in the morning so we’re usually some of the first artists to arrive and the last to leave. We had elected to drive back and forth, about 70-75 minutes each way and by the end of the weekend were wishing we had just brought our RV up and parked in the free parking lot. Lesson learned, next time we’ll know.
Friday the weather was warm, sunny and beautiful. The booths had a bit of a “sauna effect” going on, especially the inline booths that had neighbors on all 3 sides. The sun baking the roof, the moisture from the ground coming up and the insides of the booths were a little warm. For a Friday, the crowd was larger than usual. We started our day off by making our booth fee at 10:15 with our first customer, great way to start. Sales were strong until about 1 PM, then a lull, then picked up again in the late afternoon as we had the first wave of people coming in after they got off work. Sales on Friday, for a Friday were strong for us, we left there pleased.
Saturday, the day started out overcast and the sun never really broke through, although we did have some sun spots and a small amount of blue sky a couple of times, we also had some showers off and on but it didn’t seem to affect the crowd. After all, this is June on “wet side” of the Cascades, we expect rain showers for most of June . The crowd was large, but not enormous. On Friday we kept hearing that we should expect wall to wall people on Saturday, all the folks on Friday said they came on Friday to avoid the crowds. Well, we didn’t see that the crowd was much larger on Saturday than Friday. Our sales were a bit higher, but not as much as I had expected based on everything I’ve heard about this show. Quantity of sales on Friday for us were relatively small, but most were for higher dollar items, on Saturday the lower price points were selling well, but not the higher end.
Sunday was noticeably cooler than the previous days, very cloudy, but the rain managed to hold off until after the show ended. Sales on Sunday were good and with a last minute customer and our largest sale of the entire weekend at 5:50 PM, we ended up with our best sales day of the show. Just one more reason my husband keeps reminding me, “it’s not over until the fat lady sings”. Well, with that last sale, I could have sung all the way home if I weren’t quite so exhausted!
Sales results for most of the artists I spoke to were good, some were up over previous years, others down. No one I talked to reported having a horrible show, some had mediocre results while others were very happy with their results. Overall, we were happy with our results, a bit higher than our average, maybe not as high as our expectations given everything we’ve heard about this show, but it is one we definitely would like to do again.
The picture below was taken about 2:30 Friday afternoon. The food court was behind me when I took the picture, up the hill just a bit, so those sitting down for a snack or beverage enjoyed a wonderful view of the Olympics and Puget Sound. Pretty good crowd for a Friday afternoon.
