Leslie found a festival close to our winter home back in September and signed us up for it. It was a chance to get all our Boot Jazz stuff out and hopefully sell some merchandise. It is the first festival in the area that was not canceled at the last minute although the dates and venue had apparently changed multiple times over the summer. It’s an outdoor festival that was held at Town Green park. This was the first time this park had hosted this festival. On Friday we were able to load in. Friday morning we sorted through the Boot Jazz boxes and loaded the truck up with the items for setting up Leslie’s Boot Jazz booth. Although set up was not supposed to start until noon and sites were first come first serve, when we arrived at 12:30 (got held up due to traffic), most of the sites had already been claimed and many folks were close to finishing up! Lessoned learned, times set out by the host mean nothing. Luckily we found a good site near a power plug. It took us three hours to get the booth setup. Along the way we met some of the neighboring vendors. We somehow ended up next to the Dominoes pizza vendor, but luckily they were not doing any cooking (thoughts of kettle corn were running through our head) but bringing the pizzas in from off site. We finished up our set up and headed back for home. Saturday morning we were on site by 10am to finish our setup with Leslie’s boot bracelets and necklaces, along with her real necklaces. Then we sat and waited for festival goers! And we waited. And we waited. Saturday was pretty disappointing. Probably less than 400 people came through and we sold nothing. The other vendors around us sold nothing either. There was one vendor near us selling brightly colored Tutu’s and another was selling puppets that drew the families in and they had some sales. Cynthia, Felix, Lauren, Olivia and Avery stopped by to visit. Olivia showed off her new tutu for us!
We got a chance to talk with our neighbors a lot and many were very interested in, even envious of, our RV lifestyle. Most were staying in hotels for the festival. We made several new friendships amongst the vendors and helped each other with some set up issues and even with covering each other’s booth while they went out to get some food or the bathroom. Many of the folks we met depend on the festival circuit for their living and with all the festivals being closed due to COVID restrictions, they were desperate for some income.
Sunday was not much better. We arrived to find our booth had sustained damage from the winds when the storm blew through last night,. But it was not too bad and we had things back in order in a hour or so. A few more people came through and we were able to sell three boot bracelets. Two jewelry vendor’s near us that Leslie became friends with, Alena (from Santa Fe) and Suzanna, both made enough sales to cover their costs, but not much in the way of profit. David became friends with Wayne, the husband of the Tutu vendor, since he was dabbling in wood working product sales and they were from near Fort Worth. So it was not a lonely day. At 5PM all the vendors started tearing down. Trying to finish before it got really dark and it was a mad house. People dragging stuff to the edges of the park to try to load up since at first they would not let us bring our vehicles back into the park. By the time we had gotten tore down and our stuff dragged to the nearby library parking lot, they started letting people in with their vehicles. It was not a very well run festival. After we loaded up, we went back and helped Suzanna load up her booth since she was by herself. All in all, we lost money on the festival, but it was good to get back in the swing of things. We think a combination of lack of advertising and the dramatically increasing COVID cases in the area resulted in so low of an attendance.
If your interested in Leslie's Jewelry: BootJazz.com
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| Boot Jazz booth |
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| Our Vendor row |
