The time is right for Make and Take events
As the weather warms up planning starts to shift to events & festival season. Make and Take experiences can be a great way to introduce new audiences to your products and courses. They can also be a great marketing tool to expand your prospective customer base.
From a planning perspective, events & festivals have a common challenge. There is an audience that experiences downtime between all the main planned events. They are looking for new and interesting things to try. Event coordinators are often looking for novel ideas and experiences to offer. These experiences can provide a unique opportunity to get in front of large groups of people. Event coordinators often ask themselves:
“How do you keep the audience engaged so they stay longer?”
Experiences are a great way to do this. For the customer, it is a low pressure way to experience your products and services. If they enjoy the experience, they can seek you out in the future for more experiences and products.
We talked to two artisans that have designed Make and Take experiences for festivals and events.
Spice up your living space
Layl McDill from Clay Squared to Infinity created a millefiori technique that she uses with polymer clay. First, she creates an illustration. Then, she builds it into a colored polymer clay cane. She calls her product Silly Millies.
She participates in the annual Art a Whirl open studio tour in Minneapolis. Art a whirl is a free event open to the public. Over 1000 Northeast Minneapolis Arts Association members participate in this event. It spans over three days each year in May. This event draws a tremendous amount of local traffic. Usually around 50,000 people attend this event each year. However, it is a self-directed event. Attendees get maps and guides and create their own routes for where they want to visit.
Layl created a unique experience to allow Art a Whirl attendees to try out making something with polymer clay. “They can choose from a jar, a tin box or a light switch cover. We have them play with scraps of clay to create something unique. They also use my polymer clay created with the Millefiori technique. I created it as a hands-on activity that anyone can do, even families.”
By setting it up as an experience, it is listed as part of the activities for the festival.
This is a key differentiator. It’s provided a unique offering as part of the overall festival to draw more people in to the studio. As they come through the studio and participate in the experience, they find things they want to buy. They also can learn about opportunities to take additional structured experiences in the future.
This has been a great way to draw in traffic as part of the festival. It also caught the attention of the overall festival. “Creating an experience has allowed me to stand out and be promoted by the Art a Whirl festival.” This is a win on two levels- bringing in new customers and getting assistance in promotion.
This festival is a large event, with many people coming and going over the three day event. With so much foot traffic, figuring out how to manage the payment side of the experience could have been a challenge. Here Layl decided to keep it simple too.
“I set it up as a free will offering with a jar for cash and Venmo information. It’s worked out well for me.”
Creating wearable art
Jeanine Webb from Arts, etc. is an artisan in Eau Claire, WI. She uses pour painting techniques as well as Turkish Ebru marbling. She works on individual pieces in her studio as well as creates experiences. She creates experiences in multiple disciplines. She has experimented with several interesting and different experiences over a number of years. This has helped her find the right mix of experiences to offer. For her, its been a balancing act as the average consumer hasn’t usually heard of the techniques she uses.
“I created a Make and Take event as part of the Banbury Art Crawl in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. It can be really hard for people to envision how these techniques work. I created an experience where they create a Make and Take Hat. People can’t imagine the interesting designs you can put on a baseball cap! By creating a quick event they get a chance to try out the technique, and then they are hooked.”
So how did she set up her pricing for the event? “This experience was designed to take around 20 minutes and was first come first serve. I charged around $25 for the experience.”
Jeanine also leverages the foot traffic that the event brings. Thousands of people attend this event. Her make and take experience is also listed in the main directory. This makes it easy for people to notice it as part of the overall program. The success of this event has inspired her to consider other places she can take this experience.
“I’m also exploring taking this event to more community events, such as music in the park. It’s amazing how people find you. They don’t always show up right away. Sometimes people show up a few years after they first see me at an event somewhere to take a class. When they show up in one of my classes, I ask how they found me. And they tell me- ‘oh, I saw you a couple years ago at XYZ event’.” She has learned that by continuing to create these unique experiences, it builds her business steadily over time. So she keeps creating experiments to keep customers coming back.
Considerations for creating a Make and Take event
After talking with both Layl and Jeanine, there are seven things we think you can ask yourself to create your experience for a festival or event.
1. Consider transport or materials for the event experience. How easy is it to set up and administer during the festival/event?
2. Have the customer create a small and simple product. The completed item needs to be easy to carry and transport. What can you have the customer create that is easy to take with them?
3. Keep the amount of time short to complete the activity. 30 minutes or less is ideal. How can you simplify it to make it as easy as possible?
4. What do you need to charge? Do you want to do it as a free will offering, or charge a set price to ensure a certain level of profit?
5. Keep payments simple. If you have a lot of people coming and going, you want to make it easy for them to pay you for the event. How will you quickly and easily process payments?
6. What can you give or share with participants that brings them back in the future? Is it a postcard with classes, a business card, or something else?
7. How can you collaborate with the event to have it promoted? Are there images you can take that the organizers can use, or other things that can be done to promote the experience?
Events and festivals can be a great way to put your products in front of a new group of people. It provides a low risk way for customers to try out techniques and classes by creating new memories. This season is a great time to try it out to see how it can help your business!
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