JUNE IS OFTEN A VERY HECTIC TIME FOR US. MAINLY BECAUSE OF OUR FIRST FESTIVAL OUTING OF THE YEAR TAKES PLACE. MIDSOMMARFEST IS OUR BIGGEST EVENT AND WE CAN EASILY BE CAUGHT UP IN A FLURRY OF ACTIVITY LEADING UP TO AND DURING THE EVENT.
Never been to a Chicago street festival? Here is the lowdown. it can be part carnival without the rides and part block party. There is food, drink, music, art, performances of all kinds. Then there are the artists and merchants that offer a wide variety of things to buy. Most are local peeps that make what they sell, like us! There are also informational and marketing booths to promote a variety of services available to you. Everything takes place outdoors, although some shops along the street will also have their doors open for business. If the weather turns bad, the event still goes on. We are all under canopies and still doing our thing. It’s perfectly fine to hide out under our canopy if it rains too heavily. Historically, it rains at least one day of this weekend. Often it is a light rain that passed through. If the weather becomes severe we may be forced to close up shop for everyone’s safety.
This one event can easily be 1/4 (or greater) of our annual sales. For that reason, we must be well stocked on everything and we can still quickly sell out of hot items. It seems that every year, no matter how well we prepare, we still sell out of our entire stock of something. Because we normally look to our online sales for day to day sales, we do plan to ensure there is stock available for those customers outside of what we will offer at the festival.
When we sell in person at these events it will impact some online sales functions. We turn off the PICK UP option during the dates of the event. We will be at the event site from early morning into the evening every day of the festival. We have tried offering Festival Pick Up but have run into issues where the last one ended up in a customer’s hand before the order came through.
To make pricing easier and reliable, we turn off all sale items during the event period. With the volume of traffic we will have, and having help that are not all that familiar with the products and pricing it is easier to say all of one type of item is a solitary price. Having to learn the product and what’s on sale and what’s not is a bit much to ask of my helpers. This means the JUNE Scent of the Month will not be announced until after the Festival. We also don’t want to sell out of something before the weekend, as we wish to present as much of our selection as possible at this event.
If you are able to make it out to see us, expect us to be a little busy. It’s a fun environment and we strive to keep it fun. We do our best to get to every person that pops under our canopy and be available to answer any questions. This is the absolute best time to learn about us and our products. We also love to hear from you what else you might be interested in seeing us make. Most of our inspiration has come from people telling us what they like and are looking for in like products.
Other things to know about the experience. We can take cash, credit or debit – that includes Apple, Google and Samsung tap to pay. We do not accept Venmo, Zelle, PayPal or other forms of money transfer apps. We actually prefer Card payments over cash. No, we do not charge extra for using a card! It is just easier to track and saves us work closing out the books. We will offer a receipt, it will take us an extra few seconds to get that to you. We offer bags, but we prefer you have your own. This saves waste and helps us be more sustainable. We do not charge for bags!
It’s a festival with people carry drinks and food. Please don’t bring plates of food into our canopy, but do feel free to bring your drink in and you can set it on the shelf while you shop. Pets are very welcome to come into our space unless they are very large and/or excitable. There is not a lot of space, and we wish to keep it friendly for everyone. Expect me to want to pet your dog!
For our online customers that have an active registered account, we should be able to look up your account in person. If we are able to link your account to an in-person purchase you should receive the value added pricing. Otherwise, we will not manually adjust pricing. We do not offer “bundled sales”. Our pricing is firm and we wish to assure that all customers whether in person or online get the same regular price. Members are online shoppers who have shared their personal data with us, in return they get a tiny discount on many items (2.5% to 5%). This is a token gesture to thank them. EVERYONE can become a member, you just need to create an account on our website first. We may not be able to access this feature remotely, so there is no guarantee we can offer it.