Do you remember the last time you visited an exhibition laden with numerous stalls, fascinating your eyes? The clothes hanging from the racks or the glistening jewellery delicately placed in velvet cases or pastel baskets carrying a funky set of diaries. You instantly want to buy everything and then you see your wallet staring at you. While for you as a customer, an exhibition might be a cheat to your wallet but to a business person, it would be a treat for them. You might not be familiarised with these brands for exhibitions are most often organised for startups than established businesses.
Exhibitions are a fertile field for startups to gain their first recognition. As you would notice, these days the innovations in a business scale to an unmeasurable length. The last time I visited an exhibition, a woman had handcrafted collars resting on the table. Essentially, it is worn on simple outfits to give them a pop of colour. I could see people crowding her stall, asking for customised collars and her business cards were in every hand I saw at the event. It is immaculate to design such a piece at an affordable price and still have offers that attracted her numerous customers. It earned her, not just a great amount of money but also local recognition. People wanted to reach out to her and get those hand-painted collars in their closets. This is one such example among other creative startups I saw that day.
Most times during such events, investors and people searching for partnering businesses pay their visits. A business that you’ve planned for years, started executing a year back and began selling in the last few months suddenly is in the eyes of investors. This invites both expansion and a large scale of production for a startup. Popular names in the fashion or accessory industry end up finding some of their most creative enthusiasts in exhibitions. Competing times make these designers yearn for artists who can bring a difference to their racks and tend to find these qualities in the owners of these startups.
We get to know about exhibits and events mostly through media, be it newspapers, Instagram or billboards. These events are thoroughly covered by photographers, journalists and even the customers who post about their best experiences on Instagram. These startups thus, attain a lot of engagement and acknowledgement in media that invites them more customers.
Instant feedbacks and reviews are one of the best features of an exhibition. You can sense the interest of your customers both in the collection and its monetary value. It allows you to reflect on your creativity and your marketing strategy. You can then condense and finalise your target audience and measure what best serves their satisfaction.
Next time you visit an exhibition, look beyond the counters and find the eager eyes of these business aspirers standing through mornings and evenings just to make their customers happy. So many of them from small towns travel their way to urban cities to sanction their creation to a larger group of buyers. From just a beginner startup ventured into the walls of a home, these passionate entrepreneurs set their originality in stalls every few days in the hope to secure a successful place in the industry.
