A large part of Yarningham is our marketplace. It’s THE place to find the best independent producers, dyers, designers, online retailers and bricks and mortar shops.
From the beginning we set a rule that at least 50% of the marketplace each year must be new to Yarningham. This helps to ensure that the marketplace never feels like its gone stale or we’ve just repeated last year’s festival. It can lead to some very difficult decisions when going through applications but this rule is crucial for Yarningham.
This exercise of looking back through our feedback and compiling statistics has been really eye opening. We’ve never properly analysed our feedback and usually take a much more practical approach to using it. What needs to change? What can we improve? But there’s nothing like a cold hard figure staring back at you unexpectedly from the calculator to surprise you with what you’ve achieved.
And so it was with this figure. Out of 107 exhibitors over the four editions of Yarningham, 71 are unique. Meaning that over the 4 years of the festival 65% of our marketplace has been new to Yarningham. I always knew that we had achieved our target each year but never imagined that we had such a high number of unique exhibitors.
This success is really about TEAM YARNINGHAM. Without Lil, V and Helen as part of the team I think this figure would have been difficult to achieve.
There’ll be one more feedback post after this one. If you’ve missed the other three you can find them here (Part 1), here (Part 2) and here (Part 3).
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