Some of our better ideas begin with a slightly unreasonable timeline.
About six weeks before the One of a Kind Spring Show in Toronto, we decided, more or less on a whim, that perhaps we should apply.
There were three days left before applications closed.
We had been working quietly on FIORI Botanicals for some time - developing formulas, playing with scent, growing and drying botanicals from the farm, thinking about packaging and trying to figure out how this new part of Nomadic Fiori would live alongside the flowers.
We weren't quite ready.
So naturally, we applied.
And then we got in.
Which gave us approximately six weeks to get ready for one of Canada's largest and longest-running craft shows.
There is nothing quite like a deadline to turn contemplation into action.
Six Weeks. A Lot of Lists.
The next month and a half is something of a blur.
We made over 100 bars of soap. We finished our solid perfume and roll-on perfume. We made bath salts and developed four custom bath and body boxes, each bringing together different pieces of the FIORI collection.
Everything had to be labelled, packaged, counted, priced and packed.
There were ingredients arriving, labels being proofed, boxes being assembled and products curing on every available surface. We were testing displays, changing them, testing them again. There were spreadsheets and inventory counts and very late-night messages beginning with, Did anyone remember to order…?
Meanwhile, spring was arriving at Bella Sera Farm.
Which meant tulips.
Lots of tulips.
We wanted to bring the farm with us to the show, not simply the products that came from it. So while one part of the team was making and packaging FIORI Botanicals, another was harvesting flowers, processing stems and preparing enough tulips to carry us through several very busy days in Toronto.
Then there was the small matter of where we were going to put all of it.
Building a 10 × 20 Foot World
We didn't want our booth to feel like a trade-show booth.
We wanted it to feel, in some small way, like stepping into our world at Bella Sera Farm.
So we designed and built the entire 10 × 20 foot space ourselves.
Walls. Displays. Shelving. Signage. Lighting. Product placement. Flowers. All of the tiny details that you don't particularly notice when they're right but become painfully obvious when they're wrong.
Ten by twenty feet sounds quite small until you have to design every inch of it.
It also sounds quite small until you have to transport it.
By the time move-in arrived, one vehicle was no longer going to cut it.
Neither were two.
We rented a moving truck for the booth, displays, products and all the miscellaneous things we'd convinced ourselves were absolutely essential.
And then we rented a refrigerated truck.
For the tulips.
Because after growing them for months, harvesting them at exactly the right stage and hauling them into Toronto, we weren't about to let several hundred tulips cook in a parking lot.
This was the point where our casual decision six weeks earlier began to seem particularly funny.
Move-In Day
If you've ever attended the One of a Kind Show as a visitor, you walk into a beautiful hall filled with hundreds of polished booths and thousands of handmade objects.
Move-in looks rather different.
It is dollies and drills. Extension cords and ladders. Half-built walls. Boxes stacked everywhere. People carrying furniture through aisles. Someone looking for scissors. Someone else looking for the scissors that were just found five minutes earlier.
There are parking instructions and loading docks and passes and bins and garbage and more trips back to the truck than anyone remembers making.
Then, somehow, it all disappears.
The boxes are hidden. The floors are swept. The carpet is rolled out. The lights come on.
The tulips go into their buckets.
The perfume and soap bars line up.
And the doors open.
And Then People Arrived
After six weeks spent almost entirely inside our own little bubble of making, building, growing and worrying about whether we had remembered everything, suddenly there were people standing in the middle of it.
Thousands of them.
They smelled the perfumes. They picked up the soaps. They asked about the flowers and the farm. They wanted to know what we grew, how we made things and where the botanicals came from.
And, perhaps best of all, we met an enormous number of other people who make things.
That ended up being one of our favourite parts of the entire experience.
One of a Kind is a strange and wonderful temporary neighbourhood. For several days, you are surrounded by people who understand what it means to build something from scratch. Farmers, ceramicists, artists, woodworkers, perfumers, designers, bakers, jewellers, gardeners and makers of things we hadn't even known existed.
We met customers who have continued to follow along with us. We met fellow small-business owners who became friends and colleagues. We swapped stories, recommendations and the occasional moment of exhaustion.
Press
We were chosen to be interviewed for CTV primetime news and also had Frankie Ferragine - better known to many as Frankie Flowers - the gardener, television personality and member of the family behind Bradford Greenhouses stop by our booth and request our flowers for his presentation on the main stage!
For a business rooted quite literally in growing things, meeting other people whose lives and work revolve around plants felt particularly fitting.
Best Booth
And then something happened that we absolutely had not anticipated.
We won Best Booth.
After six weeks of designing, building, making, growing, packing, hauling and wondering whether perhaps we had lost our minds somewhere around the refrigerated tulip truck, it was a lovely bit of reassurance.
Not because awards are why we do any of this.
But because we had wanted the space to feel like us.
We had built it ourselves. Filled it with things we had grown and made ourselves. Tried to translate seven acres of farm, flowers and botanical curiosity into 200 square feet on a convention floor.
And somehow, people understood it.
Worth the Chaos
By the end of the show, we were exhausted.
The refrigerated truck was considerably emptier. So were the shelves. Our feet hurt. Our voices were going. The tidy inventory lists we'd arrived with had become covered in notes and crossed-out numbers.
But we left with something much more valuable than we had arrived with.
New customers. New friends. New colleagues. New ideas.
And the rather satisfying knowledge that FIORI Botanicals, which only weeks earlier had been taking shape around our kitchen tables and workbenches, was ready to leave the farm.
There are probably more sensible ways to launch something.
More measured ways.
Ways that don't involve making 100 bars of soap, building a 10 × 20 foot booth, harvesting hundreds of tulips and renting both a moving truck and a refrigerated truck with roughly six weeks' notice.
But we're not entirely sure they would have been as much fun.
And given the chance, we'd probably do it all over again.
Although next time, we might give ourselves eight weeks.
