Cram it in there

My current antique market has a more whimsical rather than upscale feel to it.  I have a few favorite booths and shelf spaces for sure (which I will show you in another post), but some booths are also crammed with things from the dollar store and drowning in Beanie babies.  How do they make money off this? And maybe equally important, how do they enjoy dealing in such merchandise?  One of the reasons I wanted to have a resell space was to be able to surround myself with more of the things I like and share them with the world (um, Maine and the current flood of Leaf Peepers that is).  Ok, so I judge - maybe some people really like Beanie babies and want to share those with the world too.

Anyway, I popped in yesterday to check on my booth, and my first impression of it was: It's too crammed!  It looks like an overpriced thrift store! I hate my booth and its tiny floor space.  Nobody can get to my awesome stuff that is just sitting there in the corners.  I am doomed.  When will my bigger booth be ready?

Then I walked around to look more closely at other vendors' booths.  And I feel better.  If I thought my booth seemed stuffed, look at these two booths.  I seriously want to know if they are successful.  Maybe they have found that the more stuff, the more sales? Or maybe they use their booths as some sort of storage space and they are actually reselling their stuff elsewhere?  I really want to know.



I could not reach anything on the shelves - maybe I need to buy my way through

Could not reach stuff on these shelves either.  What do they know that I don't?

Then you have this booth - I swear I have never seen it fuller than this.  Does the merchandise just fly out the door on a daily basis?

Minimalist booth

Have you found a balance when it comes to the amount of stuff in your booth?  The fuller, the better?  Or the more sparse and staged, the better?


PS:  While I was there browsing in the store, two of my German fruit plates sold (I love spying on my own customers from a safe distance, don't you?)  At least cute little old ladies know how to step over stuff to get to the deepest, darkest corners of antique booths.  They have more guts than me.