Trade shows and bigger vegan events
If you are serious about growing your business then at some point you will need to step up the marketing that you do. This doesn’t mean abandoning your local vegan fairs – we should all support them as much as we can – but it does mean stepping up to take on larger events like VegfestUK at the London Olympia. If your local fair is where you will meet your end customers, a trade show is where you will meet people who might want to stock your product in their stores, or a dream trade customer or investor. If the local fair is Facebook, the trade show is LinkedIn.
This step up in scale will come with a step up in budget. Not only will your stand cost you at least several hundred pounds, you will need to get stand graphics or pull-up banners designed and printed. If you are selling stock, you will need to arrange delivery ahead of the event. You will need to scale-up how many business cards, leaflets or brochures you have available to give away. You will need to get there the night before to make sure your stand is set up, which means paying for a night in a hotel. There’s no just turning up on the day with a box under your arm at larger trade shows.
But the reason everything is scaled up is because the number of people you will meet and interact with at the event will be far higher. Local vegan fairs are great proving grounds for vegan businesses who will graduate to the trade shows when they reach a certain level of success. This is why a trade buyer for Suma, Holland & Barrett or even the supermarkets will come to a trade show but not spend time going around local fairs. And if you want to grow your business beyond mail-order and your local corner shops, you need to start supplying to ‘trade’. You need to get larger retailers to take on your products. You need to get yourself into the right distributors and start selling at the right margins, and the trade show is the place to get noticed by these people.
Nākd at Bristol Vegfest in 2011
You will now find Nākd Bars in every supermarket and service station, but they didn’t get there by just calling up Tescos and asking them to stock them. They worked the trade shows, they showed up every year with a bigger following than the last. The first time Nākd did VegfestUK, brothers Jamie and Greg Combs had just three flavours of bar on sale. In 2015 they sold 67% of the business to Lotus Bakeries for £60m and then the rest of the company in 2020 for another huge sum of money. Those years of trade shows is where they made many of these connections; it’s where they built a following and got noticed.
But they didn’t get picked up year one. A delegate might walk past your stand and think, ‘they look interesting, let’s see if they are still around next year’. Or they might think about taking your product in six months’ time, or think you would be good to stock for Christmas or Veganuary, but you will never know until you get the phone call half a year later. I’ve often traced business back to a trade show that I’ve done 12 months or even two years before. For example, someone had taken a brochure or found themselves on my mailing list and got back in contact when the time was right to have the conversation. Remember, the reason that potential customer engaged with you on that day was because that’s when the trade show was, not because that’s when they were ready to buy.
And if you have aspirations of getting listed by distributors or getting into bigger stores, then you will need to prove that your company already has enough interest and a loyal customer base to generate sales. Supermarkets and larger stores test new products before taking them on long term. They may agree to a trial period of a few months or to take a certain number of units from you to see how well they sell. You will instead start using your trade show presence to try to send lots of people to buy your product in Tescos rather than selling products on the day.
Most of these shows also admit the general public, so there’s every chance that you will make your money back from sales on the day, but take an extra pair of hands with you so that you can be free to keep an eye out for the company buyers and industry professionals who will also pause by your stand. Many shows offer a trade-only event, either the day before the show starts or on one of the evenings if it’s a longer multi-day event. This is where you can mingle with the other business and the industry professionals. Meet as many people as you can, collect business cards and make sure you have plenty of your own. Practice your elevator pitch, take some samples and try to be the person they remember so that when you send your LinkedIn request the next day they know who you are.
