life at the queen: dealer merchant training

The Queen of Hearts offers a half-day training course to all dealer merchants, and although I was interested from day 1, it took 2 months of being a dealer merchant for the course to be offered on a day that I was in town and available. So I went. Yesterday!

I found my way to the Buford location and their training room just as the very charismatic Peggy Jones was getting started, and then spent the next 4 hours in sponge mode. I was delighted to find out that The Painted Hammer has developed a strong Facebook reputation with the Queen's PR staff, and we got several mentions when the course talked about good Facebook practices. We went through a tagging exercise so that we could understand how important our tags are, how important it is to follow their tag guidelines, and what happens when we don't. To the best of my knowledge, we follow the rules, but it was good to learn why the rules are there. I really enjoyed hearing Peggy's ideas on what a good booth is like, how invested the Queen is in our shared success, what our rent and fees go to, and how to promote our wares.

I'm most impressed with how the course was able to cover such a broad range of topics for such a broad range of dealer merchants with such a varied set of skills. I guarantee you all 20 of us left with a list of things to do immediately in our space, things to look into, and things to try once we've been around for a little longer...I know I did!

Here are a few things on my list:

• Our merchandising is good (thanks to the amazing Audrey), but I can't wait to get more furniture pieces in so that we have less on the floor and more at waist height and above.
• I do the website, Facebook & Instagram, but I'm missing out on an important group by not doing a monthly email newsletter.
• I need to get to know the sales people on the floor better because they talk to customers, they see our booth way more than I do, and they are going to have some insights & perspectives that could help us do better.

I'm glad the Queen offers this course, I'm glad I went, and I look forward to