The Print Show Guide
Interested in selling your collections at seasonal print shows? In this course we share six lessons on preparing for your first show. Learn how to properly display your work, gauge your readiness, and consider your print show options.
Before diving into this course I want to give you a little background to your print show options. The most popular print shows in the apparel market are Printsource and Premiere Vision, which are typically held in August, January and April. The August and January shows are the most highly attended dates. Designers targeting the home decor market are welcome to show at apparel print shows, but may have more success at home decor shows such as Heimtextil, which is known as “The biggest international trade fair for home and contract textiles.”
For a more generalized print show experience, many designers prefer Surtex, which is held in February in New York City. Surtex draws a crowd of more than 6,000 attendees from markets such as “decorative fabrics, linens and domestics, contract textiles, wall coverings, floor coverings, apparel textiles, stationery, greeting cards, gift wrap and other paper products, tabletop, giftware, toys, ceramics, packaging and publishing.” If you are interested in licensing your work this is a show that you will not want to miss!
This course was intended to be started in December, but can be used to prepare throughout the year.
Enjoy!
P.S. Want to hear more from Khristian? Check out this Pattern Observer interview.
The best part of this course for me was learning about what trade shows are the most impactful. I agree with other comments that learning about price ranges for licensing or selling patterns outright would have been helpful. I also think I’m spoiled by all of the great video courses on the site, and was expecting more audiovisual learning.
This was really nicely written but I would love to know how to speak to attendees when making sales. When they ask “How much does this cost?” what do I say? I may not know what they are looking to buy; fashion, home, outright or licensing? How do I make the sale? How do I collect the money?
I wanted to know more specific stuff, like how big of a book should I have, how big postcards should I have and so on…
Straight to the point!
The Show Guide was a very succinct and straightforward guide to presenting at your first show. I will be exhibiting for the first time this year at Surtex, and I think the checklists provided in the first lesson are super helpful!!
Loved it!
It was very interesting, you wrote about things I had never thought about… Like the importance of a press kit and so on.
Loved This Course!
There are some real gems of information in this course you may not consider before investing lots of time and money on a show! Highly recommend!