This week was completely crazy, and I rarely had a spare moment before, say, 7 pm, in the best case. Today was like that, but more so. I had a couple of urgent shipments to take care of, which I handled, but the rest will unfortunately have to wait until Monday. I hate to delay sending off orders but I haven’t been able to keep up completely.
After running over to Redmond for a few hours, I got back to Seattle with just about an hour to take care of several outstanding tasks before I needed to make some final preparations for a demo event at Les Cadeaux Gourmets.
I haven’t done a lot of events in this type of venue before, and it was nice to have an audience that was already excited about specialty foods. It never fails when I do a demo in Uwajimaya that someone will complain that my products are too expensive. In that context, they are at the top end of the scale, but for most specialty gift stores, my products are in a fairly comfortable price range, and nobody visibly compained about the prices (which I cannot make any better without selling at a loss). The only thing that makes the products atypical is that they are Asian rather than European.
So today, I had slightly more intimate conversations with customers, and a very receptive audience, and, although I didn’t do a detailed analysis yet, an apparently higher conversion rate than I usually see. I was fairly happy with the results, even though store traffic was a bit quieter than I’m used to handling at supermarkets.
While doing my demo I ran into the group manager for my team in MSN, which was quite a surprise. I don’t know why it should have been a surprise, as I vaguely remember hearing he lived in the Queen Anne neighborhood when I worked at MSN, but somehow it didn’t register. Anyway, I introduced my products (at least the objects of today’s demo) to him and caught up a little bit.
After finishing up with my demo I met up with Lisa of Three Tree Tea to get more demo materials for the next few weeks. I finally got to eat dinner at that time: a quick burrito at the West Seattle Tacqueria Guaymas. Today worked out to be about 14 hours of nonstop activity…