How to prepare for a Christmas market as a small business?

Now, we originally planned to take part in the Spirit of Christmas Show way back in 2019 before the pandemic took its toll globally. We made preparations then to attend such an infamous show heard of by so many small and bigger businesses. If you have not heard of the Spirit of Christmas show, it is a 7-day event held at London Olympia known as the “home of Christmas Shopping”. We were really looking forward to our first ever show at the London Olympia, but inevitably due to Covid-19 the show was postponed until 2021. So, when we received the email from the Spirit of Christmas Team to say that this incredible pre-Christmas shopping show was going ahead, it felt like we were all slowly starting to return to normality, our pre-pandemic life. We were given the go ahead that everything was up and running and we set ourselves the challenge of getting everything sorted to attend the show, in the space of 2 months.

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We brought in Marek our carpenter, who helped us with our stand for the CIJ Press Show back in October 2021, as we knew exactly how we wanted our stand to look. We love the typical Scandinavian cosy winter look and knew a stand design based on this theme would really complement our products. We knew that we wanted certain elements in our stand to make it stand out, for example we had a beautiful hand-crafted gift wrap station made, to encourage Christmas gift wrap. If you know us as a brand, we think that details such as this really matter. We were allocated our stand B1, which we were told was right by the entrance/exit. At first, we worried that this meant we would initially attract people’s attention when walking into the show but would struggle to keep it as we were the first stand they would pass, and the show features hundreds of businesses and stands. Therefore, we had to make sure that our stand was going to be bold and eye-catching enough to stop people in their tracks from going deeper into the show.

Every member of the team had a different role to play. Whilst Marek spent hours hand cutting the wood for our table and shelves, Pat was in charge of spray painting our shelves and coat racks, Ashleigh dealt with the marketing side of things and the rest of the team prepared the stock for the show. We had no idea where to start with what stock to take, as we had never taken part in the show before we did not know what to expect. We did end up taking too much stock, but it did mean we had a large variety of stock with us meaning when a customer asked if we had something in their size we were met with their surprise that we did indeed have the stock, but we have learnt from this from a practical point of view. At the show, you can pay for storage space behind your stand but take into consideration how you access your stock, as ours was boxed up in quantities of 100+ in 1 metre cardboard boxes meaning that actually finding our stock at times, was a struggle.

We knew that Thursday was going to be a late show, which ended at 8pm to encourage late night shopping for those who finish work at a later time, but we could not have predicted for how busy this day would be. The Spirit Team were great, they were on hand to help at any time and the marketing materials they provided were absolutely fantastic. They allowed us to give 25 free tickets to the show for our following to encourage a higher number of visitors, so we launched a series of raffles and giveaways and our followers loved it! We even got to meet some of you who managed to get a free ticket! It was amazing. We prepared our uniform and had beautiful handmade flower crowns made to suit the theme of our stand whilst maintaining an element of the brands Polish background.