> Don't confuse an art fair with a gallery exhibit. For sales at an art fair, it is always the most spectacular pieces that sell. You will sell several copies of your flashiest pieces, and perhaps none of your merely attractive or artful ones.
Cool. Thanks. I'm aiming for both markets.
> There are two possible bad outcomes to bringing the wrong number of pictures...you will wind up with a lot of unsold inventory OR (even worse) you will run out of a hot-selling image long before the fair is over. But sooner or later you can sell the ones that go unsold at the first fair (or at least re-use the frames), but you can never recoup a lost sale.
It’s the old “better to have it and not need it than the other way around scenario.” Actually there is a bigger concern, and that is the ability to transport everything in reasonable space.
> I take at least one replacement for each image, and several more of the known hot items. On the center panel I will take 5, 4, and 3 replacements of each going from top to bottom. That's one more of each than I think I will sell based on the last fair in the same building, most others will have 1 or 2 replacements. Will also take at least one medium-sized stop-gap image to replace recently sold images until the buyer has time to leave the show, this is a sort of roundabout courtesy for repeat buyers and collectors.
Excellent model(!) and I hadn’t thought of the effect of the just bought image. I agree that one wouldn’t want to put up an identical replacement immediately, as it would likely diminish the value to the buyer. Do you leave the blank spot for very long or put the alternate piece as soon as the buyer steps away?
> Also, do not think for a second that you can assess by yourself what your best sellers are going to be, only experience will indicate what's going to sell. My best sellers are not the images I personally like the best. I often cry about this on the way to the bank. In one case I avoided what became my #2 best seller for over a year, until I used it as a third-string swap-out towards the end of a show and it attracted a crowd and sold within minutes, whooda thunk.
I've heard that before. A cousin did art shows for a couple of decades. He sold artist’s paint brushes at bigger art fairs. It took him several years to get a sense of what customers wanted so he carried lots of inventory. Of course he could fit several hundred brushes in a suit case. The suit case becomes a sprinter van and maybe also a large trailer when dealing with even mid sized framed photos.
> Lights are your most important sales tool. Never count on the building lights, they will always let you down. If you can have a spot on each image, that's good. The catch is that most shows "limit" you to between 200 to 300 watts total current draw which technically means no more than 8 to 12, 25 watt MR-16 spots. This next show I've got 9 foot high panels, so I've a built a pyramid support out of the 1 x 2 Oak pieces to support 3 pairs of high CRI, 5000K, T8 fluorescent fixtures way up high, will see how that works. No spotlighting, but the colors are totally knockout with the good light quality. The MR-16 spots have a sort of a warmish dichroic halo which somewhat offsets the drama of spotlighting, will see how this plays out. Hoping the black walls don't look too shabby with the flat lighting. BTW most of the well known art fair gypsies just ignore the wattage limitations, but a newby might get busted especially if a fuse pops on his circuit.
The MR16s appear to be LED lighting. I was hoping someone has gone this route. At the fairs I saw over the summer everyone used incandescents. Lots of them. One booth had 2 lights about every 12” all the way around his 10x20 booth. I thought the LEDs would be a smarter choice, and probably more resilient to the rigors of travel.
> If you have a ProPanel setup, the most common lighting setup is Luxo style arm lights stuck in the tubes at the top of the panels, no modifications required. If you plan to do shows, you need a ProPanel setup. If you use fluorescent lightbulb replacements you can easily stay withing the wattage limit, but I have never seen a fluorescent lightbulb replacement with decent light quality, and the "daylight" ones are the worst.
I hadn’t heard of ProPanel. Thanks! Their site is pretty cool. Some of their examples take advantage of lots of vertical space.
I was half way thinking of manufacturing something but these are a good value and do everything they need to, including what appears to be light weight design while being stable in the environment
Thanks!!!! I printed yer post and will use it as a model as I collect pieces of this complex puzzle. At some point I hope to have the opportunity to buy you dinner or something for all the great info you’ve shared!!!!!!!!!!