What a market booth taught us

Online, you can watch someone scroll past a figurine in half a second. In person, you can watch them pick it up, turn it over, and put it back. The second version is far more educational.

Three things we changed afterward

• We started photographing every piece in a hand, not just on a shelf. People need to know the actual size before they buy, and a hand communicates that faster than a measurement.
• We moved the price lower on the page and the personality line higher. What sells a duck is the joke, not the number.
• We stopped arranging the display by collection and started arranging it by mood. The funny pieces together, the pretty pieces together.

The piece we misjudged

We brought what we thought was our most niche design and sold out of it in four hours. The lesson was not that the design was good — it was that we had no idea what our own catalog looked like to someone seeing it for the first time.

A product page can tell you what sells. A booth tells you why.

We still do a handful of local markets each year, mostly to keep learning. If you see us at one, come pick something up and turn it over.