First Market for my candle business

On a random summer day, I decided to sign up for my first market for my newly launched candle business. My business’s candles are travel themed and the objective is to motivate people to travel or remind them of their past travels. In a way, we want to help with the travel blues. 

I signed up, paid the fee and started preparing my candles. I did a lot of trial and error, I had a lot of frustration but I finally got a product I was proud of. 

Fun fact, my summer camp job is located behind the venue. During my shift, I saw that there was a lot of rain expected. On Saturday morning, I set up quickly with the help of my siblings and got ready to sell. The first 3 hours, I had no sales. I was paying too much money to not be getting sales, so I became really extroverted and talked to everyone who walked by. 9 hours went by fast  and it was finally time to close. My siblings and I got food from other stalls. Everything was so good. There weren't too many people, because of the weather and the lack of parking, but I still was hopeful for the second day. 

I went home and I made more candles (dreamt of selling out). The second day, sales came faster than the first. Rain also came heavily. Most people ran to seek shelter. My childhood friend Nada came to visit and that was incredibly fun, I am so grateful she took the time to come and support me! We made content, engaged with customers and laughed a lot. 

I like to be transparent in business, so I’ll tell analytics . In two days, the business made 846 dollars. The market fee was 600… therefore there’s 246 left,  but if I subtract product cost, we are at -80$.. that’s the beauty of business!  I was expecting to make over 2000$ in sales but the lack of foot traffic made it unrealistic. I made over 70 candles!