To say we were a little nervous about launching Baby’s First Calendar would be an understatement, after months and months of planning, research, development, protection plus all the ins and outs of starting a business the time had finally come. It’s one thing for family and friends as well as a number of your target market to be full of praise for your new product, but something else entirely  actually getting out there and unveiling it to the general public!

I decided to launch at The Baby Show, Earls Court. A three day event where parents and parents–to-be can get everything they need and more, from the big name brands to the weird and the wonderful, it’s all there. We booked late on and so didn’t have as much choice about our position as we would have liked but nonetheless this was it, we were going to launch!

The show is open to the general public from Friday to Sunday; we travelled down on the Thursday to set up our stand. It was tough going getting there, all the planning in the world couldn’t prepare us for not 1 but 2 vans breaking down on us, unbelievable, and it then took about 3hrs of ringing round to finally be able to source a hire van (thanks enterprise for all your help!).

After our van nightmare, no surprise we arrived rather late, about 9pm giving us an hour to set up, we unloaded our stock from the van, placed it in storage and made up our stand, with no previous experience of this we did the best we could – this is what it looked like:

Baby's First Calendar stand at The Baby Show

Friday morning, show opens and we were like rabbits caught in the headlights, neither my partner nor I had any experience of this sort of thing, and it was pretty quiet up until lunchtime. Our belief in Baby’s First Calendar shone through when people were asking us about it and we started to make sales, the positive comments from the general public was fantastic and definitely helped settle the nerves!

Saturday we found the show to be much busier, the nerves had settled and confidence was up, we sold double the amount on the Saturday than we had on the Friday and had great day, apart from the aching feet!

Over the 3 days we sold over 120 of Baby’s First Calendar, not as many as we would have liked admittedly, but nowhere near as low as we feared. The positive comments from the public was fantastic, a big thank you to all our customers.

Our goal at The Baby Show was not to sell thousands of Baby’s First Calendar’s but to raise awareness of our product and let the public, as well as the trade know that we had arrived. To this end I have to say we achieved our goal, we gave many flyers full of information to visitors of the show and these people are now becoming our valued customers.

All in all we were happy with the outcome of exhibiting at The Baby Show. The feedback I had from a number of exhibitors at this year’s Earls Court show who had also exhibited last year was that it was not as busy as previous years, maybe this is due to the current climate or venue, and it wasn’t as busy as I had expected, but as I say, all in all we achieved our goal.