Meet the Teacher:

Amanda Cockburn of Freewheeling Craft has taken Ottawa by storm with shows, online shops and partnerships over the past year. She has graciously agreed to bring her strong sales and merchandising skills to Shop School and present to you the best practices for both.

Amanda is a veteran in the sales + service and retail branding industry with over 20 years at different levels from sales floor to senior management. After working for global brands such as Gap inc, Tiffany & Co., Club Monaco and Urban Barn, her passion turned to bringing this knowledge to helping small creative businesses grow their brands. Freewheeling Craft was born out of a deep seated desire to take her experience to help small creative brands in our community rather than to keep giving to big brands where you’re never sure if it really mattered. It’s a marriage between the creativity of maker life and the deeper elements of running a business.

What will you learn?

• Markets + Trade Shows are your time to connect with people. You have 6 hours to get out, tell your story, showcase your brand and sell it to the potential customers that are walking by.
• Do you know how to set up your display creatively to suit your brand?
• Are you maximizing your efforts each moment you are presented with customers?
• Are your sales where you want them to be and do you know what your goals are?
• Are you achieving your profit goals at each event and getting your product into the world?

This two-part course is designed to help you make the most of the time you have to connect with your customers in two of the most important ways: merchandising and salesmanship.

The interactive merchandising portion of the course will go over dynamic ways to set up your display. We’ll look at creative ways to look past the simple “table” strategy, and discuss how to create your own little shop that highlights your brand.

Salesmanship is an art that must be practiced and that must talk a consistent language about your brand- in this part of the course we will go over the critical steps in the sales process so that every person that you speak to is a potential sales opportunity. We will discuss how to overcome the hardest parts of the sales process, role play (only if you’re comfortable!), and how to make sure your sales game is on point before each and every market.

Learning, sharing, and creating: this is Shop School. Through workshops, classes, and informational series focused on skill building and development, Shop School–a division of Incumaker’s Creative Lab–is an educational program dedicated to the growth and success of makers and entrepreneurs.