To the left you can see my badge fashion market. I was so excited that I actually had a badge that said "buyer" on it that I snapped this picture on my phone and emailed it to my husband, Chris. But the badge is only the beginning - Christine and I spent 2 and a half long days walking the floors of "Market" as they so lovingly call it, and D&A, another trade show across the street.
We had a bit of a different agenda this time, we needed to write down what we actually wanted to order, so we could take that back home and figure out where we are with our initial budget. We had a few appointments with different vendors, but mostly we walked blindly into the showrooms and just had to wing it. We found a lot of great stuff , but not without major exhaustion as byproduct.
Imagine this - You decide to go shopping in a bustling shopping district, and you don't quite know what you want, so you stroll around from store to store for about 6-8 hours. By the end of the day your feet are aching, you are starving and you found a few things, but you wanted so much more. Then, take that experience and add a twist to it - you aren't just shopping for yourself, but you and 100 of your friends, who have about the same general style, but slightly different tastes. You need to make all of them happy in some way. Thankfully we were staying with our friends Steve and Julia, and they decided to have a homemade pizza party, the LA air was warm and inviting, and Steve mixed me a Jameson and gingerale the second we got home - we were more than well taken care of.
Although we felt a lot more experienced this time around - we are still learning how things work in this new world. While most people were excited to learn that our store was launching in the fall and gave us plenty of encouraging words - others wrote us off the second they realized our store wasn't a reality yet. Until our money is in their hands, they could care less about us. It took Christine and I a full day to figure out that the D&A trade show wasn't just the showrooms that were already in the New Mart building - that there was actually a "show" on one of the floors with several temporary booths. It sort of dawned on us that the showrooms are permanent fixtures of those buildings - yes, it seems obvious in hindsight :) . When we realized that was the case we couldn't remember what floor the show was on and we couldn't find it in the directory, so we were walking down 13 flights of stairs opening the door to each floor on the way. Seeing Christine do this threw me into hysterics and I felt like a giggling 12 year old as we took sidelong glances from the other adults.
All confusion and mayhem aside, we felt like we made some real progress in LA. By the last showroom visit we were talking about linesheets and deliveries, what we wanted to "write" for fall and what the items would look like "in production" - everything that seemed completely foreign to us 2 months ago. We are getting excited about what are store is going to look like and what is going to be in it. We can't wait to show you.
xo
C+C
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