Fairhaven Farmers Market 1st Time
Sunday, July 8th, 2012We’ve been doing the Carver farmers market on Sunday for the past 2 weeks. As I mentioned previously, it’s a great market run by a fine gentleman, but our sales have been pretty dismal. We’ve been exploring other options for popping on Sunday and one of them was the Fairhaven Farmers Market. We decided to take a whack at it on July 8th and we did alright for our first time. Fairhaven has a descent size population and it’s literally a bridge crossing from New Bedford, an even bigger city. We’ve been refining our formula for choosing popping locations:
1. Location visibility – Is the market visible from a busy street? How will people know if it even exists? Sure the market manager will say they do marketing, but it seems most NEW customers will pull over on an impulse.
2. Age of market – A market will acquire regular customers as it goes along. It’s certainly easier to tap into an existing customer base than scrounging for your own.
3. Nearby population – Where are the customers going to come from? There seems a definite travel radius from the market people will drive to get veggies and kettle corn.
Fairhaven seems to fit the bill better for our Sunday popping location. It’s at the intersection of a busy street, right next to a bridge to an even bigger population of people in New Bedford. The Carver farmers market has great age and visibility, but nobody really lives in Carver Massachusetts. There are certainly people going to the market on a regular basis (because of age), just not that many, and I don’t see how that will substantially increase as we stay there. Our Springfield and Framingham locations increased in traffic over the years because there were that many more people to spread the word.
