Preparing for the Largest Craft Show In North America | My Market Prep Journey

Happy Sunday everyone! We are just a few weeks into the new year and I feel like months have passed since Christmas. Life has just been so busy for me between completing Christmas orders, and then putting more into my business then I was before. It take a lot out of you, but I am thoroughly enjoying it.

Since this blog is pretty fresh I figure that I should try to write some more blog posts to give it some more meat and potatoes and actually give, you, the reader, more to read! And while yes I do like to pontificate, I will be trying my best to make the topics of the posts as interesting and as useful as I can!

You may have seen some of my content from this years 2023 Winter One of a Kind show and that is going to be the topic for this post, or more specifically, my One of a Kind Show Journey! This will be a multiple part series of posts. This one will go over how I got accepted into the show.

The One of a Kind show is the largest indoor craft show in North America, taking place twice a year here in Toronto, it brings over 600 vendors on average together in one of the largest event spaces in the city. It is the perfect place to find hand crafted Canadian products of all kinds. From Jewelry to foods to house wears. And of course Crochet! They have a 5 day Spring show and an 11 day Winter Show.

I got into Winter OOAK as it’s called, in 2022 and honestly didn’t know what I was getting into. I had never attended or heard of the show but enough of my friends pushed me to apply that I sucked it up and submitted an application. An application that at first was very daunting. They wanted to see pictures of my products, my workspace and of what my booth was going to look like. They asked me for a detailed process of how I created my products, all the people involved, the materials used and the price points that I offer. Overall the entire application took me at least 2 hours and that’s probably an underestimation.

Well about 2 months later I got the email, I was accepted! The happy dance ensued of course! I had just gotten into the largest market of my life. This is like the olympics of small business markets.

Thankfully the folks at OOAK have been doing this for over 40 years and have the whole thing down to science. They start the application super early in the year in order to give you plenty of time to prepare for the show. I was very thankful for this because the amount of preparation that goes into OOAK I crazy and you need as much time as possible!

Once I knew that I was in the show I started to advertise here and there on my social media Chanels. I also started to spread my acceptance by word of mouth so that people who attend the show would be on the look out. The next step was figure out what product I was going to bring and how much.

As OOAK is such a large show, its attendance is also quite large with almost 100k over the 11 days and you really need to make sure that you are prepared to have enough but then also not too much that you end up with crazy amounts of excess!

What I did was come up with a dollar figure that was my goal. This figure would cover my expenses/investment as well as provide a decent amount of profit. Next what I did was come up with a list of items that I knew I wanted to sell. I already had an idea of what was popular at the time having done markets every weekend of the year. Then I basically came up with how many of each item I needed to add up to make my goal. And that how I decided how many things to make.

Check back soon for Part 2 of my OOAK Diaries Journey!