(Reposted from Steve)
Chattanooga Market Opening Weekend was another big success! The weather was perfect, the music was great(including this guy here, Martin Rodriguez out of Nashville), and the crowds showed up to shop local! We’re going to take a look at several different stats from the weekend so that we aren’t just looking at overall sales, but getting a little bit of a different snapshot of how things went.
Total Sales
- Saturday: $88,000
- Sunday: $156,500
As usual, Sunday was definitely the bigger day. But Saturday wasn’t too shabby, and gives customers that aren’t as big of a fan of the large crowds a chance to come out in a more relaxed environment. On Saturday we had 17 vendors with over $1000 in sales, and on Sunday we had 48 vendors with over $1000 in sales.
- Vendor Average: $1145 for the weekend
- Top Packaged Food Vendor: $5150
- Top Food Truck: $3900
- Top Farm: $8300
- Top New Vendor: $2200
So overall it was a great weekend, once again with close to a quarter million dollars in vendor sales – not a bad start to the season in my book!
A couple of quick notes to our new vendors:
I know that not everyone had great sales, or had the sales they were hoping for. I urge you to not get discouraged. Keep in mind that a lot of our vendors that are having great sales now were once in your position. I can’t guarantee that things will get better – some products may simply not be a good fit for our market, but I can guarantee that we will continue to put out reports like this one, showing that the public is coming out in support of our vendors. And so I encourage you to be persistent, build your points up, learn how to improve your display, salesmanship, and make yourself stand out. Of course, if you feel like you’re a small fish in a big pond, I also highly recommend checking out our Collegedale Market. We won’t be drawing such large crowds(for now), but there is also less competition, it’s more relaxed, and being a smaller market you could have an easier time establishing yourself.
If you did not yet know, this upcoming Sunday will(sort of) be my last as Operations Manager for the Chattanooga Market as I’ve taken a position at Saint Andrew’s-Sewanee boarding school on Monteagle Mountain. I’ll be around on Mother’s Day, but plan to be a bit more of of a fly on the wall making sure Tucker and Gib are getting the market set up. You may see me in the beer booth more that day!
See everyone this weekend!
Steve