Market Stall Employability Training:
Areas of skills training:
1. Dressing the stall – developing innovative and new ways of presenting
the work.
2. Marketing / PR on a shoestring – encouraging and initiating creative ways
of promoting the stall.
3. Reviewing stock – developing a selection process for the work being
produced and sold on the market.
4. Pricing the product – teaching methods on how to correctly price works.
5. Sales techniques/ confidence – teaching effective sales techniques and
methods of self-promotion.
6. Book keeping – setting up and teaching basic book keeping skills.
7. Liaising with the artists – creating rotas, encouraging their creative input
into the development of the stall, and taking ownership of the business.
Evaluation
By Gareth Berwyn
Workshop Tutor
Beginning period, the market stall inside the old market:
The stall was a mess, badly set out, rubbish and detritus on the stall. The
members used the stall as a place to meet up and have a chat, drink coffee have
a free sandwich and wait for skylight to open, most of the local homeless people
who didn’t have anything to do with the group would also come and take
advantage of the coffee and food. Most of the members wouldn’t come within five
meters of the stall while there were potential customers around in case they had
to talk to them.
My priority at this time (alongside the program) was to get the members to take
pride in the presentation of the stall and the aesthetic nature of the displays, to
develop the finishing standard of the work, to get rid of all the hangers on and to
change the mentality of the group to see the stall as a viable business, where
they need to be present, creative and accessible to the public.
We got rid of the coffee flask and monitored the sandwiches – this got rid of the
hangers on. Bought a couple of table easels, asked everybody to come up with
ideas on how to present the stall, we all agreed on a system and shared
responsibility of set-up on the day so there weren’t five people doing one job and
getting in each others way – this brought in an element of pride to the display that
wasn’t there before. We made the stall into an L shape, one side the display and
the other a creative space, this enabled the members to work on the presentation
of their work (mount cutting, framing, wiring etc) it changed the atmosphere from
one of tension and aggression to calm and creative It forced the members who
were shy, to stand behind the stall and answer questions from intrigued passersby,
which they hated to begin with, but subsequently at the end of the project
they would be bantering away with customers and taking commissions.
Moving the stall outside due to the refurbishment of the market, the Monday and
Tuesday sessions stopping and Skylight changing for their summer holiday lessons:
Just before this point the market stall side of the project hit its peak, the members
were consistent during the training sessions and the market stall itself, the work
was good and was selling, the members were selling the work for between £20
and £50, so the moral was high. We were then hit with having to move outside
and having to contend with our not too sunny summer – this didn’t help the
attendance. There was a bit of communication breakdown between us running
the market stall and skylight, they thought we were halting the project while they
had their ‘summer lessons’ and we didn’t – mainly because it was going so well
and we believed that if we stopped now we would lose the momentum gained in
the beginning period of the project.
During this period we lost a lot of members, some had been told that the whole
project was stopping and I never saw them again, others didn’t like being outside
with the stall so stopped attending, some of the members who are more
creatures of habit couldn’t cope with the changes in schedule we had to make to
work around the new skylight lessons, we sometimes had to cancel the sessions
due to double bookings or move two or three times during a lesson. We also lost
the extra space we had to create work at the stall and the members were denied
access to their normal workspaces at skylight so no new work was produced.
During this period I struggled to keep any momentum to the project let alone
what had been achieved before, so I started the group planning for an exhibition
– this enabled people to come to the stall for smaller stints in-between getting
quotes for materials and sourcing information for the exhibition, it also brought a
needed breath of enthusiasm to the group. The remaining members became
more focussed on their work so we changed the training days into a kind of open
session where everybody would get on with their own stuff, mounting, framing,
designing, making light-boxes and culminating in the group discussing
progression of their work. I took an advisory role during these sessions, allowing
the members to impart their own knowledge to find solutions to different
problems the members came across i.e. how to make a light-box from materials
that could be found on the street.
Towards the end of the project, we managed to get two stalls at the market
again, so we could have one to display and one to keep working on the
presentation of the work, and probably the best bit is that it gets passers by
interested in what is going on and is a good talking point that invariably leads to a
sale.
To conclude:
The bad points were the lack of communication between the two
parts of the project, maybe if I had been more vocal about the achievements
made at the stall the managers of skylight would have understood the importance
of continuity to it. The good points, from the members views have definitely been
the practical and hands on workshops, where they learn skills that they can then
transfer. They have spoken highly of Nicolas sessions and Helen Browns
sessions have been a hit with some and not so welcomed by others, mainly the
hard headed ones.
Over all, communicating with the group and asking what they want to know and
do, then changing the course accordingly has been the lesson I have learned
from this experience.