Print Stuff, York

It's Art, Karen attended Print Stuff in York, representing 5 of us from the course. It was my first experience being a stallholder at this type of event. 

In the weeks running up to the fair, a lot of hard work was put in from all of us involved. I took it as an excuse to go into the print room more, and create additional screen printed stock for myself. As well as generating extra copies of publications I'd made previously.

After creating, packaging, pricing, promoting, and finishing up smaller details the actual event rolled around quite quickly.

IMPRESSIONS

Overall it was a positive experience. Displaying my own work publicly, chatting with both visitors and other exhibitors as well as people with creative experience. However not many sales were made.

Of course this did knock my confidence in some ways, and I thought of factors as to why this could be; did people just want to buy smaller products for less money? did I price things too expensively? Were people just not interested? Was it just the wrong audience or place for me? I wasn't sure.

I definitely left with a few things to think about.

THOUGHTS AFTER

PRICING - This was a subject that cropped up a lot throughout the day. When I was pricing my own stock, I took my time and considered the following:

- The medium (screenprint - edition number, zine - how many pages?)
- Production costs (both my time and own expenses)
- Production labour (pulling layers of ink on a screen, cutting, stapling, packaging - all done by myself and by hand)
- Longevity (e.g. screenprints are archival and last forever, viewed as a 'high quality' print, a digital print will fade over time)

At the fair there was an instance of an established designer/collective selling a publication - on decent stock, with a decent amount of pages, for £3. Although this could have been old stock they wanted to get rid of, I wondered if the price even covered production costs. I was selling my own 20-page digitally printed zine for £4. 

I think pricing is something that can be really detrimental to yourself and others if not done correctly. Although it would be impossible if not difficult to standardise pricing. If people sell things for cheap, the general audience will value these things cheaply.


BEST SELLERS - It was interesting to see what types of items sold well or were asked most about by visitors. T-shirts and wearable goods proved popular. And a lot of sellers displayed enamel pins, which are in high demand with lots of people.

This made me think, do I take this into account when making my own products? Should this impact on the type of work I create? If I do, does this cheapen it?

In some ways it goes two ways: consider what sells, as it could boost your sales and point more people to your work. But does jumping on a bandwagon just perpetuate some things?