This is a season of exhibitions. For a furniture maker running a business in North Devon it is essential to exhibit our work in other parts of the country. We do have a showroom here adjacent to the workshop where I keep a few stock items and several exhibition pieces. We don't advertise the showroom except with leaflets placed in local hotels but the showroom is very useful for giving visiting prospective clients a good view of the potential quality of a piece of furniture made in my workshop. Of course the showroom must be kept clean and tidy, reasonably well heated and lit with proper exhibition lighting. This is nothing terribly special, just lighting tracks and a few spotlights that can be adjusted to light different parts of the room as the exhibition changes throughout the year. Hopefully we sell pieces throughout the year and I may bring pieces that are being made for clients into the showroom to "rest" before delivery so the permanent display should be a constantly changing event.

I'm gearing up now to go round all the local hotels with bundles of leaflets, this is a constant recurring chore throughout the summer as visitors take leaflets and hotels fail to replace them. Your job is to get round once a month and refill the box before some ghastly local potter snitches your place. It's a help if your face in known and the hotel knows the kind of work you do so they can recommend you to their clients.

Thankfully we don't have too many tourists coming and looking around theworkshop. I really fear the family with the young child brandishing the icecream. The child invariably arrives drenched to the skin after one of our Devon downpours, he then proceeds to drip melted ice cream all over the furniture. You can tell that I really love my customers can't you! "No, it's quite alright, little Johnny is perfectly OK skate boarding down the top of that dining table, don't worry at all".

Better still are the exhibitions we go to ‘up country.' For a few years now I have taken a stand at one of our local county shows. This is a great show as long as it doesn't rain. I enjoyed the atmosphere immensely but it does somehow seem wrong to be selling fine furniture from a tent in a field. The beauty of these shows were you rent a pre—erected canvas tent usually with the addition of wooden flooring, arrive on Wednesday, cut the grass that has grown up between the floorboards and begin putting the exhibition together. Invariably it rains so any drawers that were closely fitted in the carcase would jam up immediately and all those waxed, polished surfaces needed to be re—polished before show time. But after a bit of practice we got quite slick at putting on a good show quite quickly. The beauty of these shows was that you are able to meet the public face to face. Now I quite enjoy this, having done it a few times, but I must admit, the first time was very worrying. The natural inclination is to feel rather rejected by somebody who simply does not want the piece of furniture that you are trying to sell them. After all, your natural inclination is to be personally involved with the design and the making of the piece in question. It should, if you have done your job right as a design maker, be an expression of your sense of style. It may have been crafted by your own fair hands so it is only natural to take offence when some ruddy—cheeked farmer towing a brood of snotty—nosed kids describes your master piece as bloody waste of money. The trickhowever, is not to get personally involved, our red—faced friend is rejecting the piece of furniture, which he has a perfect right to do as a potential customer, he is not rejecting you. It just so happens that right now he is talking to the wrong kind of furniture maker and you are talking to the wrong kind of client, it happens all the time.

These shows are good because you meet all kinds of people and if you keep your ears open you will get a fairly clear view of how people react to your work. Secondly you may meet somebody who really does want to buy a piece of furniture from you. Bear in mind the economics of the situation before you go to a show like this. If it costs you £2,000, and it may well do so when you tot up the cost of your pitch, van hire, accommodation and lost production, then you have got to sell if you're profit margin is, say 30%, a total from a show like this of £6,750 or if you charge V.A.T. somewhere nearer £8,000. This my dear reader is just to cover your costs! So anything you sell beyond that might just contribute to the beloved profits.

The other kind of Whizzo show is the Craft Gallery. These can vary from thesuper professional to the damn—right amateur and you will only really find out which one you are dealing with by doing just that, dealing with them. Years ago I used to sell furniture through large London stores like Libertys and Heals. They charged what I felt was an enormous "mark up" of 110%. I have been dealing now with Craft Galleries in various forms for a few years now and find that their costs are getting similar to that of the large London stores. Except they call it something different. Quite often a Craft Gallery will ask for and sometimes received a fee which they call a commission. Now which ever way you look at it 50% commission, which is not uncommon, is very similar to 100% mark up, except its called something different.

An Exhibition piece by David Savage The Linenfold Cabinet in Swiss Pearwood. Made in the workshops of David Savage Furnituremakers by trainee craftsman Robert Eusden 1994.

CRAFT OF CABINETMAKING NO 32 first published by David Savage in Woodworker magazine

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