“If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.” – Wilson Mizner
I’ve done a fair number of craft shows and boat shows since 1992. And I’ve learned the wisdom of the quote I used above. “Walking,” a show just before it opens, shows the wide variety of items and categories for sale. But it also shows the amount of copying, “research,” and plain ordinary theft. Stalkers with cameras photograph the containers the competition uses for cosmetics. The spoon display and how the beads are hung are also copied.
If you are too lazy to do this, some websites aim to assist you in making your marketing appeal to the customer base. They’ll show you how to containerize, package, and display for maximum effect.
Of course, your competitors are all going to the same sites and buying labels and containers designed similarly. The final effect is a pattern of sameness as you walk from one end of a show to the other. The result is similarity at a venue where the emphasis is supposedly on uniqueness. Failure to follow the pattern might make you feel like a dinosaur of traditionality.
OK, you develop a unique display or product idea that no one else has. As a result, people love your booth, and sales are swell. Don’t count on retaining that lead for too long. The stalkers are out there, shooting and sharing pictures on the web. This spring, I almost had to physically threaten someone I had caught photographing some of my work.
Years ago, I had a long discussion with a designer whose work I admired. She had been in the show circuit for many years. She mentioned that a new and hot idea was in a nine- to eighteen-month cycle from when it hit the crafts market to when it was duplicated by other craftspeople and finally offshored to India, China, or Indonesia for mass production. Nowadays, the cycle is shorter.
Several factors favor this, but the most important ones are that many shows are not juried, the show organizers do not insist that the product be the work of the crafter themselves, and the show organizers allow imports. All this fuels a race to the bottom in quality.
I refuse to consider these issues as traditional versus modern production. Many fine things are made with lasers, three-dimensional printers, and computers.
No, it’s the race to sameness that kills uniqueness.
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You hit that on the head. Our Christmas show/fair used to be all original work by local people. Now there’s a bigger venue and mixed with the local work is stuff that could be found at Walmart or on Amazon. The way I see it, I don’t control what anyone else does and maybe not even what I do, so I just kind of let it go.
Wwwith exceptions I have begun to think that I am done wwith craft shows, and may see if I can jury into art shows, we’ll see how that goes.
Good luck! Juried shows are — in my limited experience — more rewarding in more than one way.
Most of the big art shows in my area are juried shows and they are $$ but wonderful. I enjoy purchasing items from those artists.
But what is interesting is your discussing photographing others’ work. In the small art shows we attend I have seen several ‘No Photography’ signs. I always thought they were meant for people like me who just like taking pictures. It never crossed my mind it could be meant for other vendors.
It’s a form of intellectual property theft