Setting Up a Live Sale

     There is definitely a lot that goes into holding a live sale. If you, like me, make the majority of the things you sell, you will spends months making and accumulating items so you have a good variety to offer. I do my lives with my phone, and everything shows up backwards when you flip the camera. So I print out everything backwards if it is something I show for people to read at home. I have a very small space available for my sales, but I am pretty creative with my use of space. The tripod and all of the items end up spaced out on my bed. This year I had a new pink unicorn tapestry (it can also be a table cloth for when we have live shows again) from my friend, Lynn Isenbarger. 

    The dolls are stored wrapped in paper towels so I make sure they are all unwrapped and laid out nicely. I make walls with pillows so things don't fall off the far side of the bed. I have everything I need to run the sale right in front of the tripod. This is my list of sales rules (also doubles as my script for the beginning of the sale when I am still freaking out), a clipboard so I have a hard surface for writing, a sharpie and a pen, and my printed name tags for the bags. For the miniatures sale I held in August I started doing the printed up name tags. Anyone who expresses interest in attending the sale and anyone who has purchased from my sales in the past gets a printed tag. This makes the beginning of the sale, when I am starting to set up the claim bags, run more smoothly. 

     I was tired at the end of the sale and I forgot to take photos until I had already started to clean up. I did have a bit of a mess, but it was not too horrible. Oh, another good thing I remembered this time around was to have my on-the-go extra phone battery ready. I know from experience that even when my phone is fully charged at the beginning of a sale, the amount of battery power the videos use will drain the battery and give me a low power notification before the end. My extra battery was not charged during the miniatures sale and I had to plug into the wall. It was not good. So I was prepared this time and only had to take a few second to plug in. I definitely need to get a ring light though. My room lighting seemed even worse than normal during the last sale. It is hard for me to show my sales items in bad lighting. 

      I have always put my claim bags at the foot of my bed until this sale. This time I made a pillow wall at the head of the bed and lined them up there. This worked so much better! I paid close attention to keeping them in alphabetical order and took a bit longer doing that than I usually do. I feel it was worth it. I spent less time stressed that I could not find someone's bag. No one ended up with a duplicate bag because I could not find theirs (this MAY have happened one time at a previous sale, but I am not positive) and nothing fell over. I think this will be the placement from now on. At least until I can safely have helpers with me. Then I will probably see about having Elecktra keep the bags in order. And maybe put the miniatures in the bags. I have not figured out the best way to have her help me. It's now been over a year I have been running the live sales by myself. The first one, Black Friday 2019, was because I had no idea. The rest were because of quarantine. But eventually I know I will be able to have her come and help me. 

     The setup and immediate aftermath of the sales is not too bad. I am usually very organized, can make excellent use of space, and I have enough practice doing the sales that even though every single one of them has scared me I think I have gotten pretty good at them. The only work I did on Friday, other than the sale itself, was to make a list of people who had claimed items. There was a lot more work to come.