This was our first time participating in this art festival and for us it was a good experience. Mill Valley is just north of San Francisco in Marin County which is an affluent county, everything I had heard about this show from other artists proved to be fairly accurate. There’s a customer base that knows and appreciates art. This is one of the dustiest festivals we’ve ever done and load in/out can be challenging. I thought the festival was well run, great volunteers, good Artist communication before the show and good support during the show. We had elected to pay the extra $100 for a premium spot which gave us the advantage of being able to drive to our spot for load in/out. The premium spots were also supposedly more level, and most seemed to have more light getting through the trees than the booth locations where you had to dolly into. The event is held in a park that is a Redwood Grove, beautiful park, but a very dark location with limited sunlight getting through the redwoods. We were very happy to have our battery and LED lights for the show. Parking during the event was provided at a local school where they allowed artists and volunteers to park. We had elected not to attend the Saturday night artist party but due to the fact that we couldn’t get our truck out of the parking lot, ended up having a glass of wine at the party while we waited for a clear path to leave. The organizers then commented on the fact that more artists attended the party than ever before and apologized for running out of wine and food. I’m guessing there were several other artists who, like us, couldn’t leave so went back to see what goodies were available. Unfortunately there was not much by the time we packed up all our jewelry, loaded it into the truck and then realized we couldn’t leave yet. This is an expensive show to do, $525 booth fee, optional $100 for a premium spot. There is also no overnight, onsite parking for RVs and since this is the Bay Area, the cheapest RV lot we could find close by was expensive. At least the expensive RV lot gave us a chance to catch up on laundry since we’ve now been on the road for more than 3 weeks! Load in started at 3:30 Friday and we were glad we arrived shortly after the official start of load in. Due to the trees, it starts getting pretty dark by about 6 PM. Show hours were 10-5 both Saturday and Sunday and I’m sure some of the artists were still loading out when it got dark Sunday night. The roads around the park are very narrow and we were very glad that we were not towing our travel trailer through this part of town. Our booth was directly across from the info booth so we saw firsthand how hard the volunteer staff was working and dealing with issues like artists unloading in the wrong spot or temperamental artists demanding better spots, etc. Overall I thought the quality of the show was very high, I didn’t see any obvious buy/sell. Since this is our first trip to California for shows, I enjoyed seeing a lot of art work from artists I’ve never seen before. Is this a show we’ll do again? Provided we can combine it with at least 1-2 other shows in the area, this is a show we would like to try again. I’m not sure this is a show I would drive from Seattle to San Francisco for by itself. However, we were wondering on Saturday if we had made the right decision to do this show. Sales both days started really slowly. By noon on Saturday we only had 4 sales for a total of $99. The vast majority of our sales both days were between 1-4 PM and there were times, especially on Saturday where we were glad to have the Square as our back up credit card device, we had a few times where we were both running cards, wrapping up jewelry, and still had people waiting patiently in line. I’m not complaining, it was a good problem to have, just wishing the sales were spread out a little more throughout the day. Overall this was probably the best 2 day show we’ve had this year, Sunday’s sales were about 75% of Saturday’s sales so were satisfied with our sales at the end of the show. Unfortunately not all artists were as satisfied as we were, I don’t know too many of the artists but in general I heard a few comments that sales were down or sales weren’t what they expected based on booth fee or based on AFSB listing this as the 5th best show on the West Coast in their 2011 listing. I saw a lot of bags being carried, several large, wrapped 2D pieces being carried out so I know some artists had good shows. I didn’t really get a chance to talk to many of them near the end of the show as I didn’t feel I could leave the booth for an extended period of time.
