Anna Bowers will not need to lug around containers of her decoupage artwork or sit at a display table for two days at her next craft fair hoping to sell enough of her wares to afford the several hundred dollars in vendor fees a local craft show usually charges.
In fact, the next show for the communications director and Little River resident who sells decoupage nightlights as her side hustle is at a high school band booster show in Albuquerque — a city or state she hasn't been to in years.
Bowers is one of hundreds of crafters along the Grand Strand who have been affected by the dozens of craft fairs that have been cancelled due to COVID-19, which has impacted the income of the soon-to-be grandmother of two and mother of a college sophomore.
So Bowers, like many others have turned to sites like Etsy, Facebook and Instagram to keep her crafting business afloat.
“I had to kind of get creative and what can I do to try to get this to take off,” she said. “I hear this a lot in the crafting community… ‘I’m not making my side money because my craft shows aren’t happening. But it still is a viable concern.’ It’s a second income and it’s important. Even the people who do these shows, they’re really suffering and I don’t see the end in sight.”
It’s arguably more of a daunting reality for Ashley Santana, who owns Santana’s Resin Shop. Santana, like Bowers, would schedule dozens of craft fairs and festivals like the Little River Blue Crab Festival and the Shrimp Festival to sell her customized pieces made of epoxy and resin. But unlike Bowers, crafting is Santana’s primary source of income.
“I’d say business has been down between 35-40 percent in sales from last year,” Santana said, adding the decline has been from not being able to have that face-to-face interaction with people at festivals. “I had to definitely switch gears and really zone in on e-commerce to try to get my product out.”
Santana’s audience has grown from her usual Grand Strand customers to online customers as far as California, Oregon and Montana.
She has relied on her Etsy page, and business pages on Instagram and Facebook, sometimes posting as much as five times a day.
“It’s kind of a different process, where the customer is getting to view more of the process of the pieces instead of just being at the festival and seeing the pieces already completed,” Santana said, adding she posts snippets of up to a minute on her social media pages to show her followers how her pieces were made.
She said it definitely has opened a new demographic for her pieces.
“Festivals have a certain demographic that will be there, but online I reach from 18 to 70 years old on my pages that view and purchase my products,” she said.
There are still some aspects she misses from the in-person festivals, outside of the lost revenue.
“Seeing the excitement on people’s faces when they see the pieces, you can’t replace that,” Santana said. “That’s just a great feeling to see someone enjoy what you just made that much.
“I can kind of still get that when they leave their reviews. I definitely miss the interaction.”
Bowers also misses interacting with her in-person customers.
“I miss talking to people,” Bowers said. “I miss people walking by and saying, ‘Wow, that’s really pretty. How did you do that?’ I miss explaining to people how I make what I make, what inspires me, what’s involved.”
But Bowers has made the best of what this circumstance has left her and others gifted with crafting skills. She became an Amazon handmade vendor, a highly selective process, as well as began selling craft kits for rock painting and decoupaging aimed at those who have been quarantined for a long period of time to try their hand at a new craft.
She said the attractiveness of selling crafts through e-commerce sites may impact craft fairs and festivals when those opportunities return to normal.
“I think we’ll see a little bit of a downturn because the online craft fairs are much more affordable,” Bowers said. “We might kind of migrate to that platform as opposed to dragging everything that we have out, and sitting nonstop for two days and trying to find somebody to watch your booth so you can go to the bathroom.”
Santana said she isn’t sure she’d be able to give up the craft fairs all together.
“I love them both so much,” Santana said. “I think now that e-commerce is such a big part of my life, I wouldn’t want to let it go once we’re able to do festivals again. I definitely would want to keep both of them pretty even. They’re both different experiences. They each are different people. There are people who don’t use computers and don’t have smartphones, so I can’t reach them from my e-commerce site. But I can definitely reach them face-to-face at a festival.”
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