Yesterday a woman came to the fair. Paid her entry fee then proceeded to give out flyers and booking forms to our traders. I advised we do not permit this at our events to be met with “I wouldn’t have paid the entry fee if I’d realised”.

So I refunded her and told her to leave.

Am I being too old fashioned in thinking it might have been polite to contact us in advance to ask if we had a procedure re this or to introduce herself on arrival and ask if that was ok to do? I don’t think so.
There are so many more organisers out there now to when we started organising events 20 years ago but it is a matter of professional courtesy to ask first.

When I started there was no social media to look at, it was a case of newspaper adverts, Friday ad, and finding websites we could advertise on, putting flyers in shop windows, libraries and other places happy to accept them.

Traders found us that way and over the years the events built through patience, hard work, and networking.
Other organisers visit our events, sometimes even attending as stallholders themselves before becoming organisers. Some of which sadly in the past have been underhanded towards us even after us helping them so excuse us for being wary of protecting our livelihood but we’ve seen the good, bad and ugly re events.

We have always been open to cross promotion where dates/venues are not conflicting. You will see on our social media that we share other events.

What I personally think is rude, disrespectful and simply unprofessional is to attend another persons event and tout for traders. It’s not spiritual, ethical and an incredibly lazy way to go about things. You have social media, Google and so many other methods where you can look for traders and that’s how traders find organisers that advertise their events. You need to put the work in.

Our contact details are easily found. If you would like to cross promote (that means sharing our events on your socials too by the way) then we are happy to do this.

Good manners cost nothing.