As we prepare for the Melbourne Gift Fair on 5 – 9 August we wanted to give you a behind the scenes look at what goes into bringing you the best stand we possibly can! As you can appreciate the wholesale homewares business in Australia is all about moving pieces and once fair time is upon us, it is up to us to juggle those moving pieces and make them fit into a well merchandised and shoppable fair stand!

So where does it all start for us? Planning the layout of the fair stand is a huge undertaking. It starts with AutoCAD drawings that literally cover the walls of our office, with our collection of wholesale wall art forming moving pieces that are pieces of a giant jigsaw. Once new wholesale wall art is covered we then move onto other categories such as wholesale cushions, wholesale furnishings and homeware accessories. Our wall plan then moves into a plan to pack endless amounts of stock into the appropriate pallets to make unpacking and set up as painfree as possible!
Fair set up is now just over a week away for us! We are heading to the AGHA Melbourne Gift Fair with a new collection of over 550 products! Work has started in our warehouse building fixtures, picking and labelling stock and velcroing endless amounts of wholesale wall art. Samples from our factories are a daily reminder of the work that we have in front of us and we are “white knuckling” it on a few late arrivals!
So off we head to trade show! A small advance team of 4 head down to do the fair set up! And then the fun really begins. For all of you who have worked at a fair it’s the set up that’s the hardest work of all. We arrive to our pallets and a blank space! Our external walls and lighting are done for us but the rest is up to us! Internal walls, flooring, internal lighting all need to be put up in that first day!

Its absolutely exhausting work but we love it …….. we just can’t believe that we have to do it all again so soon!

The best part of the fair for us is putting faces to names and getting to know our customers. So when you’re in Melbourne please drop by and say hi!