San Francisco Show Recap

I thought I’d post a few photos of my table at The Artisan Fragrance Salon that took place last Sunday. It was held in an art gallery, so the perfumers had no control over the artwork displayed behind and around the booths. My table had landscape and wildlife art, which was accidentally somewhat appropriate. Other perfumers had some very wild artwork behind them. Space was tight and ventilation was not ideal, but spirits were high and everyone was very enthusiastic about the first fragrance event on the west coast. Attendance was excellent, and the tables were very busy from start to finish.

Here was my table as a whole:

Here are the larger display bottles:

And here are the sniffing jars. We labeled glass tumblers and sprayed them with the scents so that people could pick up the tumblers and sniff to get a quick idea of the scent without having to spray. Then they could use the 5 ml travel spray testers to spray skin or paper strips for anything they wanted to explore in more detail.

We took some travel sprays to sell and sold a large percentage of those we brought. Next time I should bring more, but I need a more streamlined checkout process with easier receipts to fill out. I learned a lot from this because it was my first show.

I had two wonderful helpers at my booth for the day: my assistant, Natalie, and Julia of Undina’s Looking Glass. If you follow that link you’ll find Julia’s great write-up of the event with pictures of many of the booths. You can also find lots of photos circulating on Facebook. I owe Natalie and Julia a giant thank you for their help.

I wasn’t able to go in person and I so very much missed getting to meet people. I feel very badly about that and hope to make it up to my local friends when I start having some open studio hours so that they can come up to see me and play with lots of scented goodies here (more on that later).

It was fun to hear stories from the show. One of my favorites was from a woman who said she’d smelled Forest Walk on another woman in the line for the restroom, and she loved it so much she had to find my table to try it herself. Some other people fell in love with scents by sniffing the tumblers. Some scents are more accurate that way than others; I noticed Incense Pure seems nicer on my skin than on glass, but many other scents seemed to work well on glass.

All in all I think it was a successful event. I want to give many, many thanks to all the people who came out to show support for artisan perfumers at the west coast event.

I’ll get back to work on the regular program now. First up is getting Champagne and Vintage Rose back on the site. I brought Champagne to the show but used up that first small batch and need to filter the next batch. I also need to photograph the new 17 ml bottles.