Bitter Bitch Co’s First Festival
Everything a new vendor might want to know about festivals, pricing, and
why I’ll never work with Country in the Park again
I had a pretty transformative experience over the weekend. I did my first really big show for Bitter Bitch Co. We booked a booth at Country in the Park in Sacramento, an event that was supposed to draw over 38,000 people this year. We needed a break into the festival circuit and have had a lot of misfires, either because of the name or the images, or both. So I’d decided to jump on every opportunity that knocked on our door and this just happened to be the first. It was certainly one of those situations where there’s no such thing as ready. You don’t know what you don’t know. It was an opportunity, albeit an exceedingly overpriced one, but we needed to make our debut somehow so I committed. The entire process was a fucking fiasco from start to finish so I’ve decided to document it for any other up-and-coming entrepreneurs that just might learn something helpful from this story.
How it all started…
I started making Bitter Bitch shirts as promotion for my website. Then I thought I’d come up with some pretty cute concepts so I launched the online store. I wanted to up revenue and start selling face to face so I began looking at festivals. So for the last six months, I’ve been going to every single event I could, inquiring about pricing and applications. I quickly decided our year end goal for the Bitter B would be Cowboy Christmas here in Vegas, a 14 day event showcasing anything and everything country, which coincides with NFR Finals. Vegas goes full country and believe me when I say people save up all year to attend these events. I’d never heard of it but after attending for the first time, I went to town on digging up actual numbers, and what I found is going to be a shock. The buy-in price for Cowboy Christmas is ~$8,200 for every 10×10’ section of storefront, and if you want to be on the red carpet, it’s another $40,000! Yes, I said 40k. No, this is not a fucking joke. So I knew if we wanted to shoot for a booth at the end of the year, we needed to get in on any and every event we could because buy-in, including equipment, storefront, inventory and staffing is as much as many people’s yearly salary. The bad news was, no one was loving the "Bitter Bitch” concept.
Enter Country in the Park
We applied to everything we could from state fairs to the local farmer’s markets and were either waitlisted or flat out denied. Things were looking bleak and I was considering a future in online pornography to front the business fees when Country in the Park responded with a resounding yes to my application. I was floored. I was also suspicious because unlike many other events where I had to submit pictures of the booth, of the clothes, and a diagram of our booth setup, these guys just wanted my website address. Too good to be true? Surely but there was that sliver of delusion that said my brand speaks for itself and even if the event is total trash, maybe our stall will kick ass regardless. Then they sent me the booth fees. They wanted $2800 for a 10×20’ space. I expected it to be a little more in the $1100-1800 range, especially considering it was only a two day event and their online presence looked pretty trash, BUT my family is from the Bay Area and confirmed that this was a huge concert every year. So I took the plunge and paid the fee. Then I threw up.
What could go wrong?
Once the fee was paid, I went to town spending the last few cents we had left on inventory. I originally meant to have roughly 900 retail items to sell. This math was based off the 38k person figure they provided. According to the internet, roughly 1-1.5% will actually convert to shoppers and not every one of them will make a purchase with you. I guesstimated 320 actual shoppers buying between one and two items, priced between $35-65. This should have put me in a very safe place to conservatively sell ~65%, leaving me in the green for the weekend without sacrificing items or sizes. Great. I made all the purchases and as soon as the boxes started to show up, everything went to complete shit.
My trusty trash, entry level heat press broke in half. Still under warranty, I called the company. Instead of sending a new one, they wanted theirs back. I found a big enough box, packed it carefully, took it to Fedex. It never started tracking. A day, two days, a fucking week. It disappeared. So we argue about that for a week until they send me a new one. Never arrives. Turns out it was sent to a different address. This shit goes on for over two weeks before I end up buying a commercial press off some stranger on Facebook Marketplace. That was $600.
So there I am pressing away until I realize I’m damn near out of decals. My trusty decal provider fucked around, didn’t process my order for over a week, then decided even though I paid $46 for overnight shipping, they’d sit on the package another additional week. I spoke to five different customer service reps who did absolutely fucking nothing to resolve this issue (shoutout to Ninja Transfers for being the fucking worst decal company out there). I contacted a few guys here in town; they didn’t even email me back. I decided there was simply nothing I could do and to stop worrying. The next morning I stuffed everything, even the unpressed blanks into my trailer, hooked up, and pulled out of the driveway. Just as I pulled the e-brake lever, some guy in a Corolla threw a large package at the doorstep and wouldn’t you know, it was my decals.
On the road
There I was, towing a six ton trailer 11 hours to a place I’d never been before to do something I’d never done. Tight.
SIDENOTE: For those of you just joining us, you should know that the subject of towing is a sensitive subject around here. This truck was bought exactly two years ago and this was only the fourth tow trip that it had run since being bought. More or less of a problem since I’d sold my house and all my belongings to travel in a fifth wheel. This ended up with me living in someone’s driveway back in Vegas (where I funnily enough still am). You can read about that shit show here.
We made it (the cat and I) all the way to Buttonwillow where the 5 meets the 58. We spent the night in a gas station parking lot next to the trucks feverishly cutting out decals until I finally fell asleep to the hum of diesel engines. In the morning we hit the road early to make the remaining four hour trek. We arrived to the RV park at Cal Expo and was pleasantly surprised. It was quiet, clean, and easy to find. I unhooked the trailer and began throwing all the inventory outside. Luckily enough my extended family lives in the area and showed up to help.
We got to the Cal Expo race track to find it was sheer chaos. We drove all the way to the very end of the vendor’s line to where our tent should be (last stop before the Port-a-potties). Someone else’s trailer was parked there so we just parked in tandem. Not five minutes passed before some short guy with glasses asked me to move my truck so they could erect a tent. Then he said don’t worry, we can do it after you unload. Great. Five minutes later, some tall asshole with an Oedipus complex showed us and told me to move my truck. I explained the interaction we’d just had and instead he basically told me to move my truck and fuck myself. So I did. Some guys popped up an Easy Up and walked away. No table, no chairs. All that just to erect a fucking camping tent in 60 seconds. About an hour later, another vendor asked if we could move our trucks out of the center so they could set up their tent. In the three hours we were there, I was told to move my fucking truck four times. During the shuffle, we also uncovered a large nest of hornets that were becoming increasingly angry. I made the necessary calls only to be told “that’s a CalExpo problem”. This is when I realized the weekend was not going to be cute. I spent the rest of that night pressing shirts and bags until I passed out.
Day 1
5:30 am I awoke from sheer anxiety and pressed for four more hours on the trailer floor. A few of these, a few of those, before I had to give up and concede. We had what was had and that was going to have to be good enough. The hornets were out in force and had clearly not been dealt with, as had been promised. In fact, they seemed pretty pissed and the mystery tent next door that just absolutely had to be fucking erected at the moment we arrived, magically disappeared. We were once again the end of the line.
We had a few people come by the tent, mostly to laugh and take pictures with my stuff without actually buying anything. We made a couple sales, but as the day dragged on, I became more and more concerned. At exactly five o’clock, the phones all stopped working and even though my Square reader should have been able to continue taking credit card payments offline, well, it didn’t. We were without a credit card reader at a cashless event. If I’d been by myself, that’s where this story would have ended. By the grace of God, my cousin has a work cell with First Net (a cellphone provider meant specifically for first responders giving them first access to cell towers). He had it in his truck, and we were miraculously able to hotspot off that for the rest of the night. And before I hear some shit about “emergencies”, let me tell you that it seemed like a real fucking emergency to me at the time, so fuck off. The sun went down and the 15 year olds were out in volume. This did not translate to sales and by the end of the night, I was considering not even coming back the following day. On the bright side, zero sales meant zero restocking and zero pressing so I took advantage of a hot shower and went the fuck to sleep.
Day 2
The next day after a good solid cry, I decided to rally. Considering the weekend up to that point, I found it hard to believe we’d be able to bridge the over two grand gap just to make my booth fees back so I filled our cooler with beer. If nothing else, at least we could have a good time. The day started out strong and I immediately noticed more appropriately aged people around. We had a few hours of strong sales, matching the previous day’s sales in the first two hours. Then it hit. People were coming by in droves, taking pics, pulling sizes, asking about our Instagram and website. The reception was amazing; people really loved our products. It was damn near 90° outside and we were selling hoodies left and right. The standout of the day was our new STFU zip-up and I was pleasantly surprised because none of it had been crowd tested yet and I had to think to myself ‘how many people are really going to where something that says FUCK on the back?’ The answer: a fucking ton.
The night dropped and to my great surprise, we did bridge the gap. We made just enough to cover the booth fees and the RV park. We, however, did not cover the inventory, the building supplies, or any other miscellaneous shit, including the almost thousand bucks in gas. But we made our booth fee back and after speaking with many other vendors, I was shocked to find that many others had not. In that way, we were very lucky.
The Overall Tally
So here’s the nitty gritty of the story. Overall, it was absolutely not worth going to Country in the Park. It was completely mismanaged. The booth fees are astronomically higher than other festivals, especially ones that last three or four days. They only care about getting their money and once you’re there, expect almost no support from your point of contact person. I discovered that almost everyone there was a first year vendor. When a festival has a lot of new vendors, that means none of the previous vendors are willing to come back, and that’s a huge red flag. Also be wary of situations where you don’t have to work hard for an acceptance. Most acceptances are based strictly on your packet; if you’re not submitting an entire packet of information on your booth and your products, there’s a problem.
Overall for my weekend at Country in the Park, I spent ~$8,800 in supplies and inventory, ~$200 in miscellaneous food and drink, and ~$900 in diesel, bringing my all in to ~$9,960. My sales came in at ~$3,100, bringing my total to ($6,860) not including the week of week and income I missed and my new secondhand press. When you put it that way, not that tight.
I would do it all again and here’s why:
I got to see how real people (i.e. strangers) reacted to my clothing and brand. Before that, it was some erroneous online sales and a bunch of friends who buy shit just because they want to support you. Your mom can buy every single shirt you make but does that make you a successful designer? Uh, no. So I got to see in real time people interact with my stuff, and it let me know if this was a silly idea that needed to be put back on the shelf or a legitimate business that needed to continue growing and evolving. People liked it (some loved it) and they bought it so the answer is obviously keep going.
I got to see the real nitty gritty of festival work. It was all conceptual before that. I suffer from Independent Woman Syndrome meaning no matter how tough or challenging, I can do it by my fucking self. I’ll die before I ask someone to help me. Well this proved to be way too much for one person to handle and now I know that if I want to continue, I need a strategy for either working smarter not harder or figuring out how to get the help I need. That lesson alone was worth the cost. Better to find out now than to find out at an event that legitimately draws a crowd of a million people and your fucking credit card machine doesn’t work.
Entrpreneurship is hard. Sales are hard. Being the face of an entire brand and business is hard. But it can also be worth it. While I would never work with Country in the Park again, I would absolutely recommend doing a live show, if for experience than nothing else. I hope someone with dreams of festival grandeur finds this blog and these figures and it genuinely helps them. If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to drop a line below or contact me directly here.
Fuck Country in the Park and Happy Festivaling!