I was appointed Oxford Etsy team Captain back in June in prepation for the Etsy Made Local event which was happening across the country. There was a lot of interest and the team grew really quickly - we currently have over 200 members in the group! After realising there were so many sellers, we wanted to start giving people (as well as our selves) more opportunities to sell.
We set up our first Oxford Etsy pop up shop over Christmas from November - December. It was a great success, we had thousands of people visit in the 6 weeks we were open. There was an overwhelming amount of positive feedback from all the customers that stopped by and it proved to be every successful for all of the sellers. I'd always wanted to try running a shop selling my jewellery so for me it was another dream come true moment (in fact for the three of us that worked on putting the shop together in was quite an emotional moment when the shop was officially opened by the Abingdon Town Crier)
In total we had 50 different sellers over the 6 weeks. This was a great opportunity for the local sellers to show their work to the public (and show how talented Oxfordshire is!)
It was lovely to hear that people had travelled to Abingdon specifically to see our shop and for some this was their first time visiting Abingdon. We were really keen to come back after Christmas with an even bigger shop that had separate rooms for us to run craft workshops and courses but unfortunately there were a number of hurdles we couldn't get past - alas it was not be...
However, I do like to keep busy and so I'm currently working on the next project - we are hoping to run a monthly spring/summer market in Oxford from May to September so keep an eye out on social media for the details on this when we have them.