What Ten Years of Selling at Fairs Taught Me
This is another entry in my case study series, where I look back at a customer experience from more than ten years ago. The woman at the center of this story has since passed away, and I share this with respect for her memory. The purpose of the series stays the same throughout: what would I have done differently if I had the tools and resources available to me today. So let us get into it.
The Hidden Cost of Showing Up at Fairs
The thing I dealt with most back then was the presence of being at fairs. I underestimated, and I mean I underestimated deeply, the size of the investment a fair demands. There is the money you put in, and there is the maintenance that follows you while you travel from one space to the next space to the next space. For small businesses and founders who attend fairs to sell their product, showcase what they make, find their customer, and use the moment for marketing, the format holds a clear appeal. People still want human contact. We want to interact with each other. We want to look, touch, feel, and sniff before we make our decision.
That appeal is honest, and it is the reason fairs continue to fill rooms. What I missed was the question sitting underneath all of it. I had not yet sat down to understand what sales truly means, or what distribution channels are meant to do for a business. Once you understand that, the whole approach looks different.
Why I Would Have Built My Own Online Fair
Had I understood distribution then the way I understand it now, I would not have spent my energy traveling to fairs. I would have built my own online fair instead. Gary Vaynerchuk is one of the voices I hold in high regard on this topic, and for years he has spoken about the growth of social shopping, the idea that people will do more of their buying directly through social platforms. We see it everywhere now, and his point is that we are not at the start of this shift, we are barely approaching it. China sits far ahead of where we are, while many people here have not caught on yet.
That is the tool I would have reached for. Social shopping would have been my fair, the place where people experience the product without standing in a crowded hall. Look at it closely and it is QVC in a new form. I would have used it to speak about the product, to let people share their experience, and to keep a conversation going around it. A social media management approach turns one event into an ongoing presence, and that is what a small business needs when budgets and time are limited.
Social Shopping as a Distribution Channel
Treating social media as a distribution channel changes how a founder sells. The skill set behind selling sits in your soft skills. You stay cognizant of how people think, the psychology behind their choices, the way they present themselves, and what they are looking for. You hold a conversation where you gather information rather than push a script. That awareness would have served me well in that period, because I was green, as green as the leaves behind me when I recorded this.
For content creators, artists, and influencers who build a following around what they make, social media creation and steady content creation carry the same weight a fair stall once did. The work of producing posts, replying, and keeping a calendar full is where workflow automation earns its place. Tools such as ChatGPT and Claude Cowork take the repetitive load off a small team, and a social media management tool keeps the schedule moving while you focus on the human side of the sale. This is also where a creative agency or outsourcing social media becomes sensible, freeing a founder to stay close to the customer.
Keeping the In Person Magic Alive
Online presence would not have been the only thing I did. Absolutely not. I would have kept a physical moment alive as a promotion channel, because the anticipation builds when people know you are coming somewhere. There is a heightened feeling, that sense of finally being able to meet you, to see the product in person, to sniff it and judge it for themselves. People want to experience a thing first, and that desire is a gift to any seller who knows how to use it. So I would have held on to that, and I would have let social shopping carry the weight of daily selling between those appearances.
The lesson is steady. Sales lives where attention lives, and attention now lives on social platforms. A fair gives you a day. A well run social presence gives you every day, and it gives your audience a reason to keep coming back.
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Footnotes
1. Vaynerchuk, Gary. Crushing It! How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence and How You Can, Too. HarperBusiness, 2018. https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/crushing-it. This source supports the article because Vaynerchuk sets out the case for selling and building a brand directly through social platforms, which underpins the argument that social shopping replaces the traditional fair as a distribution channel.
2. McKinsey and Company. Social Commerce: The Future of How Consumers Interact with Brands. October 2021. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights. This report supports the article because it documents the rapid scale of social commerce and the lead held by markets such as China, which confirms the observation that Western markets sit at an early stage of this shift.
3. Pink, Daniel H. To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others. Riverhead Books, 2012. https://www.danpink.com/books/to-sell-is-human. This source supports the article because Pink frames selling as a set of soft skills grounded in human psychology and active listening, which reinforces the point that sales success depends on understanding how people think and what they are looking for.
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