How We Prepare for a Farmer's Market // selling soap and bath bombs, what we bring, tips and tricks

so here is our current setup hey guys welcome back to another video today's video is going to be really relevant for a lot of you guys watching who own soap businesses and with the weather warming up we all know that the farmers markets are coming back and so on today's video i will show you how we prepare for our farmers market so come along with us so our market is tomorrow and we have all of our products here that we need to prepare we need to wrap these bath bombs kayla's over here wrapping some soap which side you're coming on he's wrapping these soaps that we have had curing for a long time we cannot wait to debut our tall and skinny soaps to this market so excited about that but the first step in preparing for a market is preparing our inventory and we like to have our soaps and bath bombs fully wrapped and we use biodegradable film here for quench so that's really what we're doing right now is building up our inventory for markets i get asked the question all the time how much product should i bring to a market and my answer to that is if you have the product try to bring as much as you can at least in the beginning because you really don't know how busy it's going to be how much you're going to sell each market is so different so unless you're there every week which i do recommend if you're able to you should go every week even if your first couple weeks are super slow and you barely sell anything stick it out because the longer you're there the more people will come and buy from you i promise that is exactly how we started it was extremely slow so in the very beginning bring as much as you can because if it's not there with you in your booth then you can't sell it so that is my advice for that for us because we have been going to the market now for about two years we're gonna bring as much as we can we have a lot of bath bombs that we want to sell we have a lot of soap that we want to sell and we're also going to bring our sugar scrubs our body butters our body lotions all of it as much as we can and because we are coming back to the market after not being there for a while we're expecting to sell quite a bit and hopefully the weather is going to cooperate with us right kale yeah and also get your body butter while you can because uh as it warms up and gets hotter that's a product we are not going to have at our table very much longer yeah that's another question that i actually get asked a lot too is how do you keep your body butters from melting when you're vending outside in the summer heat and the easy answer to that is we just don't we don't like to have our product damaged and if you have body butter sitting out in the sun even if it's not in the direct sunlight it will melt and as we're selling body butters online on our website we actually pull that product from our website from i think our cut off date sometime soon sometime in may all the way to the end of summer into fall and once the cooler weather comes around then we start to bring it back to our website and start shipping it again and i know there are people out there that formulate their body butter so that they don't melt for us we prefer to keep our recipe the way it is and just not have it available when it's too hot to ship it keeps things simple and we really like the texture of our body butters and we don't really want to change it and when the hot weather comes we offer a lotion which is uh which is much easier to ship because it doesn't melt quite like a body butter does it's a lot more stable and if you are going to the markets one thing you will definitely need is something to be able to carry your product from point a to point b safely and securely and that's where these guys come in these long flat totes that you can get from anywhere i think we got this from walmart did we get this from walmart probably walmart canadian tires i don't know that thing looks pretty old maybe we uh just picked that up somewhere you can literally find this at any home goods store or a version of this and we really like these types of tubs because they're secure these ones snap shut so it's extra secure and they really help protect our soap from anything that could happen to it and we like the flat structure because we're able to to stack these guys one on top of another and they're an awesome way to make a really great use of the space in our car so i highly recommend getting a few of these guys we use two of these one for soaps and shampoo bars and another one to transport bath bombs because we find that this is a really great way to protect both of those guys from any harm to transport everything else we use a taller version of these totes i don't have an example of it here right now but again you can find them at any home goods store look at the tall and skinny version of our orange patchouli bars i love how these look so much they are just absolutely gorgeous and here is the tall and skinny version of our rosemary mint bars wow they just look fantastic love them and of course our best seller the tall and skinny version of our georgian bay bars smells so good so what kale's doing now is printing off some labels because we need to label all of these soaps that we are taking with us to market and as you can see here is our short and squat old bar shape and then over here this is the raspberry vanilla right here and then over here you see our taller and skinnier bars and over here are some shampoo bars that we also will be taking to market everything has to be wrapped and labeled so that is the step that we are at right now is just labeling everything and getting it ready to put into their totes these lip balms also have to be labeled as well and i think i think does every flavor have the proper jar for a kill or do i have to make new jar labels for other flavors i'm gonna have to check that we don't have one for creamy caramel okay so that's something i'm gonna have to make okay cool got you [Music] floating [Music] diving conscious like a dream [Music] you and me so this is all of the soap that we wrapped and that we are going to have ready for the market and kayla's just finishing off these conditioner bars and shampoo bars and then we have to wrap up some we have to wrap up these bath bombs still and then after that we should be able to start putting things into their totes [Music] like these froze and as you can see here we have about four to three of each type of scent and we found for our particular market that this is a good balance and we have gone home with the majority of our soaps in this tote we've gone home with barely any it really differs from market to market so it could be hard to predict and we have also our shampoo bars here with our conditioner bars everything is wrapped and ready to go and there's still some space in this tote and normally i like to throw in random odds and ends in there if you find something last minute but this is normally what our soap and shampoo bar toe looks like here's kale putting away the lip balms into their box and and because these are glass jars we want them to be very secure and that's why we like to put them into a thick corrugated box especially when driving out to the farmer's market location it's a bumpy road so we want to keep these as protected as possible and as you can see we have a lot of lip balm flavors i don't recommend having this many this is just me trying to get rid of all of my flavor oils but yeah these are our lip balms and these will go into this box we'll close that and then see how the flat tote allows us to stack things that's perfect for market kale's just adding some extra packaging now just to make it extra secure so it's not rattling around in there as we're driving it to the market so one thing that you absolutely need to have when you go to a market is a float of small bills and coins here we're in canada so we need to make sure we have lots of loonies and toonies as change uh there's nothing worse than uh not having a float and having your first sale come in uh for the day and having them drop a 50 on you and they're only buying one bar of soap uh you want to be ready for that we always like to have a float of about 150 and most of that will be loonies two knees and fives i might have one or two tens in there but it will be a lot of five dollar bills two dollar coins one dollar coins we like to put our float into these things these are waiters aprons and they go around our waste and the reason why we like these guys is because we carry our money around with us the money box is clunky and if you got to leave your booth for whatever reason it's really obvious that that is where your money is but this guy you carry it with you or if you have to put it away somewhere you can easily hide it and it's not as obvious as a big clunky money box but with that being said putting your money in here is a little less secure than a money box so you kind of have to weigh out your options for us because we like to be mobile we're always on our feet a waiter's apron is great for our purposes this is also a really useful thing to have too and this is basically a plastic small tote and what we put into here is a lot of different odds and ends that really we can't put anywhere else so for example i like to use a soap dish from ikea and what i put on here are cards and why i like to use this for our business cards is because we're out in the open and if you put them in between these slots they don't fly away in the wind whereas if you have them flat on here the wind can move them around and it's so much easier for customers to just pick a card up that way and that's why i like this guy you can get the soap dish for like five bucks at ikea and if you look into this tote there's a bunch of junk in here there's our business cards that we like to keep in here we have twinkle lights that we were using when we had our booth indoors and this is super important these are i don't know where the second one is but we have two of these these are our card readers and now kale was saying that you don't want to turn a customer away because you don't have any change for them that change being cash the same reason why you don't want to be without this guy and this is a card reader people are going to want to pay with debit and credit you're going to lose a lot of sales if you don't have a way to collect debit and credit so i would recommend you get a square reader i have a link in my description below if you want to get set up with a square reader highly highly recommend these guys and they charge by plugging them into your computer that's a little port over there and we like the ones that are the tap option and they they also read the card here through this slot so these are amazing and we have yeah we would have easily lost hundreds of dollars worth of sales if we didn't have one of those another great thing to have at market are these little signs i think i got these from michaels no i got these from amazon and these are chalkboard signs and i write on these using chalk markers and if i were to uh want to put different information on this guy i would just have to paint over it with some chalk paint in order to rewrite something else on here but these are so handy when you are vending in a market because you want your customer to know exactly how much your products are at a glance you don't want to have to always be explaining to them how much lip balm is or how much a soap is so these little guys are amazing to have at market and what else is in this guy we got some hand sanitizer which would like to put on our table we also have these little uh stands and these are really cute just put them on here and you set your little chalkboard sign up like that and it looks amazing we got these guys from amazon i think it was like 20 for 20 for i think 20. i'm not sure i'll i'll try to find them and put a link down below but these are so handy but keep in mind that if you have this type of setup where it's a little uh stand with your chalkboard side this is not exactly windproof you may get these little signs blown over by the wind so the way we deal with that is we have this sticky tack and this is what we use for emergencies and if there is a wind blowing we take a little bit of this tack and we will actually stick these guys right on our display shelves which we also bring to market and i will show you that in a couple of minutes but all of this stuff is small and there's really no better place to put it so we just throw it all into this box and it's such an awesome place to know where everything is and jiggy is playing around with the apron string so i showed you those little signs inside earlier but these are some big chalkboard signs and these are great for displaying the prices of your bigger more eye-catching products like our soaps and our bath bombs and i got these all at michael's which is a canadian craft store and just like with the mini chalkboard signs if you wanted to put any new information onto these guys we would have to paint over this with black chalkboard paint and that is what we have been doing we've done that a few times now with these guys and you can get also the chalk markers from michaels and we like getting them in these really nice bright neon colors because they really stand out and they're really great for catching people's attention and they can see the prices clearly at a glance these guys are awesome for that and the signs are sitting on top of these wooden crates which we like to use to add extra height to our booth we like to have different levels of height when it comes to displaying our items because that makes everything look so much better and these guys here these metal tins we like to put our bath bombs in there and they're super easy to stack and pour it around because they're pretty much indestructible and i got these tins from the dollar store i think i got this from the dollar store too i think this wooden crate was from ikea and these trays down here were also from the dollar store so if you're stuck on ways to display your products i would highly recommend going to the dollar store there are so many cool things there that you can use that are so affordable for your products that look amazing and if you are going to market you always want to make sure that this guy is charged because they charge through a usb cable like i mentioned and the way you would check to see whether or not they are charged is you would press this little button here and it's going to show some dots because there are four this is actually fully charged and you also want to make sure that it's connected to your phone because that is how you take your payments so i'm just going to quickly check my settings and i'm going to click it's hard to see here but there's under settings there's something called hardware and then the first menu item is the square reader i'm going to click connect a reader here and then it's going to instruct you to press and hold the button on your reader until the orange lights flash there you go and it's pairing it right over here and then it's connected that easy and because we have two i should actually write on here that this is contactlesschip5983 so that i know this is the right one because i confuse the two sometimes but yeah that's something that should go on your to-do list to check before you head out to market because nothing sucks more than bringing a card reader that is dead and is not charged which i have done before actually so i have the jars that i want to take to market in their boxes and now to have them all even extra secure i have this big deep tote that i will use this also makes organizing everything so much easier and when you are going to market the more organized you are the better trust me another essential that you definitely need when you're vending outdoors is a tablecloth for your tables we have three tables right here three three yep so three tablecloths for three tables we have our shopping bags we have three sizes of shopping bags we got these small sandwich bags for single items we have shopping bags that are medium sized which is what we mostly use and that's when people order or buy three or more items and then we have really large ones which i don't see here are we bringing the large bags tomorrow what do you think let's bring some yep yeah okay great and then we have our two totes one is filled with soap the other is filled with bath bombs kale likes to cover the bath bombs up with the towel which is smart because we don't like these bath bombs touching sunlight and we try to prevent the sunlight from touching our bath bombs as much as possible because if they're exposed to sunlight they start to fade so we cover them up we have our big tote with all of our jarred products in there and here's kale with the large size nice little bags yeah top we're gonna keep everything snug and here is our lip balms right here so you wanted both of these right um sure let's just bring both okay and uh yeah that's pretty much all our product that we're bringing so let's go check out the hardware the equipment that we're bringing in addition to all of this so here is our current setup we've got our heavy duty canopy tent which is a 10 foot by 10 foot we have our three tables stacked over here and we have weights to hold down our tent back there behind the toe that kale just put in are our risers our wooden risers that we display a lot of our product on and that is the where all our jar product is in that tote and we're just going to use a stacking system to stack the rest of our products and kale has a system totally down we've done a lot of shows and you'll find that the more you do it the more comfortable you'll get and you'll become more familiar as to what you can't or cannot fit inside of your car these risers are a weird shape so in order to transport them easily from one place to another we bring them around in a tub like this and this helps us a lot [Music] is [Music] [Music] is [Music] so that is it that is how we prepare to go to a market and as you can see it is a lot of work and that's something you have to consider if you're wanting to include farmers markets as part of your income stream for us it is worth it we make pretty good money when you go out to these farmers markets and we love the connection that it has with our local community there's nothing better than a farmers market and to get your brand and your company out there in front of the people that you actually live within a 10 mile radius of so i highly recommend doing that and it's a great way to get your products going and getting sold and in the beginning that kind of traction is so important if you're trying to motivate yourself to keep going so if you can get yourself to a farmer's market do so if you like this kind of video please leave a thumbs up and until the next video keep smiling keep being awesome and we will see you in the next one and of course keep making beautiful things bye guys [Music] [Music]

Channel: Jerika Zimmerman

Views: 18,062

Rating: 4.9775281 out of 5

Keywords: how to make soap, soap making, cold process soap, cold process soap recipe, bath bomb recipe, how to make bath bombs, bath bomb making, soap business, bath bomb business, make soap at home, soap diy, bath bomb diy, etsy business, small business behind the scenes, vending at farmer's market, selling soap at a farmer's market, farmer's market tips and tricks, farmer's market must haves, preparing for a farmer's market, what to do for farmer's market

Id: X7vHvcI1FN4

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Tue May 11 2021