Decisive weather today. We got lucky yesterday and there was really only one shower, around 2:00, and no wind. I thought the booth turnout was pretty good, and I made very good sales. I had a few nice interactions and some fantastic customer appreciation. Several young people attending their first markets were so thrilled that we exist. I wish we were going to be there next week for their next visit, but I admit I'm enjoying the little mini-vacation prospect of a Saturday off next week. In all these years, they are quite precious. I'll probably waste it cleaning my house or something.
Wish I would have thought to say goodbye to more people and get more stuff at the farmers' market. I get so wrapped up in responding to customers and watching the clock until I can go home that I sometimes forget to be there now. I lingered at the end though. A couple of guys were doing capoeira and playing berimbaus so I enjoyed that novelty that comes from empty spaces and being in a public park. I wanted to thank them but I was the last person on the block so I just went home.
My little start on a fundraising campaign (still unofficial) went well...I sold $173 of the Market logo bags and hats. I'm paying 50% to Market, something I put into place a few weeks ago. I ran my thoughts by our interim GM. I know we can't go full-on right now with so much to do for HM, but I can do my part and it will matter.
I've been selling logo bags for at least a decade and just keeping them the same price as the ones sold at the Info booth, just the flat bags. They started at $5 which was basically cost and during the 50th I put a rainbow blend of ink on them...the 50th logo didn't translate well to the bags but the ink's beauty kept them selling. I got the price up to $10 when the bag price went up a bit and that printing required a lot more attention, wasted ink, and time. They sold great at $10 but with the new design, it just wasn't enough for them to be the cheapest bag...I want to know people really want it out of all the products I sell, not just as the least expensive bag option they can find in a pinch.
I redesigned the logo last spring. I did my own version without a plan for it, just to give myself something to print I will enjoy. It's better than the 50th logo and appealing in a new way. I drew my tools in it, my squeegee and rulers and pens and stuff...an idea which I had long ago and just found a bit too hard to draw. I had planned to draw everyone's tools...including a ukelele and other things to represent craftsmanship. Never got that far. I like to draw flowers. But the basket of flowers and tools in rainbowey blends is quite pretty, and now with the addition of the full-size bags in black and dyed colors, as well as the new hand-colored hats, I have a pretty successful and attractive line of fundraising merch!
Frankly, the pandemic kicked a big hole in our sufficiency to a degree that we are not really aware of in all of its aspects. We were closed for 10 weeks, sold at 50% capacity for a season and a half, and have still not restored our composting, garbage-sorting and durable flatware programs, among other things. Our advertising budget was cut in half and is not restored yet. Our staffing losses were profound and except for a couple of site crew, we have completely new staff. It took awhile, but we have good, solid staffing now and are feeling like we are going in the right direction, and are more-or-less back on track. We still don't know quite where we are, having lost a lot of our tracking options during the transition. On my list to restore are the weekly census of member numbers, and all the other ways we tracked ourselves.. I have a fairly long list of what I want to restore...for one thing, I want to go back to volunteering fewer hours and working to replace myself. Of course I do that at the same time as making myself indispensable, because I'm just thorough and interested in having everything running well. There's a level of ownership that I'm going to have to let go of at some point, but I'll get there.
Almost doubling the size of the Holiday Market was a calculated risk and it's going to take another year to make it really work, but I do think it was the right thing to do. There aren't events like it any more, extended, consistent offerings indoors during the challenging weather of the late fall and early winter. We thrive in there...it's comfortable, safe, and warm. Attracting new members is the key. That means a lot of time getting them signed up, oriented, and into the basket of our community. We don't always do our best at making ourselves easy to understand or enter into. Myths persist. But we're worth the effort.
All of us in the basket is a metaphor from our beloved former GM, Beth Little. It's a beautiful way to encompass our attitude toward our members and mission. We want to have abundance for all of us, to keep us together, to keep us contained within our vessel as we traverse the world of retail and human interaction. I have loved trying to interpret it over the years. I have hated it. We've used it since 1981 I think. We don't change things that easily. The basket and a rainbow...that's kind of us. Shiny in the rain.
My idea for the fundraising campaign, if we agree to start one, is for other artists to interpret the basket themselves, in their style of creativity. We've got a lot of strong illustrators in the Market right now. It's an open metaphor that could allow for a lot of variation, and still be recognizable. A basket of baby animals? A basket of foods? A lot of people like using bones and artifacts from nature...I can see a gothic treatment, even a macabre one...or a basket of stars and planets. I've got plenty of ideas.
Not every logo treatment will sell, and I have mine right out front now and they're really the nicest items I sell. I've made literally thousands of dollars on them since 2019, especially in the last few weeks. People are quite thrilled to wear Saturday Market hats to show their support (and I guess coolness? Who knows?) I give away a fair number of bags to people who buy multiple items or just need a bag...it floors people to get a free canvas bag, even when they are obviously flawed, with spots on them or crooked prints. They are so appreciative. It turns out people really like showing their support for Saturday Market.
So I am convinced we need a fundraising campaign, a web page and a donation button on our official page, and a clean, simple approach to showing us at our best in a way that can be easily supported for people who don't live here, who have come once and long to return, for people who just want to see us continue to operate, grow and improve, and for ourselves as well. We love to support Saturday Market. Many of us would support it more if it were easier, and everyone likes to show their support or get something in return. So I made t-shirts too, despite my efforts to get farther away from retailing t-shirts. There's a wide variety as I had a lot of random shirts left over from the fundraising campaign where I learned how to do this.
James Bateman and Crystalyn Frank get the credit for showing me how it is done. James is a genius designer who has been working for various orgs including OCF for decades. He knows his way around a website and has a great sense of what will sell, and how to sell it. Crystalyn gets the credit for making it all possible. One of her responses to the pandemic and drastic loss of income for OCF was to get this campaign mounted and functioning for the two years the event could not be held. She brought the right people together and made it an earth-shaking Fair in the Clouds effort that was sadly thrown out with the bathwater, but it stands as an accomplishment that all of us who worked on it know intimately. It was ground-breaking and highly successful. I got the chance to step up and design and print many of the things we sold in 2021 and felt like it was probably one of my greatest artistic achievements in a 50-plus year creative career. I felt so very good about it.
Because apparently, I like making money from my art, but I like it twice as much when it benefits the whole community. I love seeing those Fair in the Clouds shirts on people and I love it every time I sell one of these Saturday Market basket hats or bags. It's so sweet to interact with the lovely people who are spreading my joy around the world. It fits so well with how I see myself as I enter legacy territory and begin to leave worker-bee territory. I'm not going to live forever (neither are you, surprise...) and I want to be pleasantly remembered. Not as that awkward person who doesn't know how to ask for permission or make things happen in human relations. Not as that messy-house person who went to drive my little-used car this week and thought the temp gauge was showing an empty gas tank...oh well, I have a full tank now. Not as that earnest biker who is lucky when I'm not run over on my slow way home.
I know I can't control how I leave this world or how I am remembered. I try to do good when I can, not to please any deity but so I can counter those moments when I just hate myself and everything about my life. They don't come that often but they do go down to the bottom of my soul as I bring up all the things I've stuffed down in a long and awkward life. Self-hatred is the biggest thing in many of our lives, many of our struggles. We hold ourselves to high standards. For me, it is rare that I actually feel fantastic about anything, much less about anything I have done or said.
But when I was printing the aqua bags this week they were so beautiful to me, I went and got every aqua shirt in my piles and printed them up. The warm pink and yellow and peach inks just thrilled me. I have to mark these moments to remind myself that I have them, since so many of my work moments are just kind of resentful and bored, after screenprinting for so many decades. I ruin a hat and toss it aside in disgust. I procrastinate even going out into the shop and despair at how to extricate myself from my stuff and my properties at some future point. That archive project just defeats me every time I think about it. I don't want anyone else to write the book about Saturday Market, but maybe I don't really want to be the person who writes it. I'm chewing on that.
But when it comes to filling the basket for the Saturday Market community, I tuck my self-hatred in behind it for a minute and put in some lovely, graceful things that I am proud of. I hope you all enjoy them.
And once again, I am not really going to ask for permission. It's launched. It's no secret. You are welcome to climb into the basket with me, and join in the joy of giving. Let me know if you have a problem with it. We can work that out.
It counters the way we are all engaging in the holiday consumerism that is on our plates big time at Holiday Market. Let's buy ourselves our durables program back with our efforts. Let's buy ourselves a DEI training and a program to increase our inclusiveness. Let's grow together and leave something meaningful behind. It's roomy in this basket! Come on in.
