Home, I Love My Home

Coffee in the Dunkin Donuts go-cup, "Jessica" by the Allman Brothers on my iPod. It's the road home from Philadelphia! Elaine is driving and she and Bill are in the front seats listening to their iPod through the car speakers. J is in her carseat next to me in the back and she is watching a dvd through the car system and listening through her headphones. I have the sunscreen up on the window to my left and I'm listening to my iPod and writing up this post to upload later. It's a technology marvelous day!

Yesterday was just too full of stuff to post. First there was packing and getting out of the room, then I stayed busy enough at the show that I never even got the chance to get coffee, much less post. The show ended at 3:00 and we broke down and packed up until 9:00. It's a grueling job. The new booth is gorgeous—we need a few tweaks, but it's mostly just stunning—but it's time-consuming to assemble and disassemble. Most of what we had there we packed up into crates and into my new pallet—which was just the right size—and it'll be shipped off to Vegas for the ACRE show in April.

All that's coming home are a few pieces I am going to swap out and all my pedestals. I need the pedestals for the studio gallery and the Decatur Arts Festival in May. Yes, it's after Vegas, but I don't want to have to deal with shipping them back. I need a display solution I can use and store in Vegas, and I'll keep driving back and forth to Philly with my regular pedestals. Why not get more pedestals you might ask. Well, they're nice, but they're sinfully expensive. I can't afford another $2,000-$3,000 in pedestals. Not only that, but looking at our booth, I couldn't help but feel that the pedestals were a weak point.

So how was the show? Well, it was unexpected. I am still analyzing the figures and the concrete sales numbers (more of that business/marketing speak... I wonder if I'm coming down with something?), but I already know that most of my total orders were for sculptural decorative glass and metal pieces instead of the functional glass pieces, and the vast majority of my new clients bought the glass and metal. I only had one new gallery order a broad body of work spanning functional glass and decorative glass and metal, the rest of my functional glass orders came from existing customers--and I saw few of them.

In the end, sales numbers were solid and the due dates are spread out between now and the middle of June, and that's really all I could have hoped for.

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Now it is several hours later, we're home (having dropped Bill and Elaine off in Greenville), we're clean (well bathed), we're fed, and we're ready for bed. Tomorrow more show and industry musings. G'night!