How does event vendor jurying work?
I've been asked a few times for instructions on jurying an event. Yet, all I know is what I've picked up second hand, never having had an opportunity to jury an event myself. What follows is how I believe most organizations conduct their selection of vendors, but it may be pure fantasy as jury-by-check behind the magic curtain of the term 'Juried' seems prevalent today, like MSG is allowed to be within 'Seasoning' or 'Natural Flavoring' and others.
Be Aware! To 'Jury' vendors can mean essentially anything. Most promoter have shown themselves to have their own, unique definition. I've even heard of declared crafter AND vendor fairs advertised as juried, since they have to approve the retail vendors' applications too. This is mere screening to me, and as the term Juried is used & defined on my site. If you allow vendors with 100% retail, then your application process to review all applicants so as to not allow in ugly booths, weapons or other offensive material, or even to avoid too many vendors in one category, etc. it is NOT jurying. You are merely screening. Obviously not everyone that Applies will be Accepted, that is why it is called Application and not Registration! Jurying is the process of identifying for removal all retail and then selecting the best of the artists and crafters, while trying to maintain a diverse selection.
Most events these days ask for photographs of the artist's booth display, a table shot or two, as well as product close-ups. Juried events will usually ask for photographs of the artist producing a piece from scratch in their workshop. Promoters tell me of so often getting getting photographs of the caliber of a basket being taken apart on a pick-nick table in the yard or someone with a blowtorch at their kitchen table. This is not quite what promoters want. Some events still accept or insist on slides, usually the larger, higher-demand art shows, who have juries of, I picture: old ladies dressed in their finest sipping, never slurping or spilling, tea while debating the quality of an anonymous egg shell artist's work projected on the wall yonder, just out of view. Is the reality of the process some old crone calling your bank from their dank basement, verifying your available funds?
These days, some promoters ask for or will at least accept a website link that has photos on it or imaged on CD. Promoters would be wise to realize though, that many artists are older or even elderly, and are not frequently techno-savy, nor do they wish to become so. The age proportionality holds even more so when you speak of the Masters in any category. It takes time for true, skilled talent to develop! Events not wanting to ostracize those so developed should always allow for other non-electronifty submissions also. I would say about 1 out of 3 or 4 folks I give my website address to at shows stop me, saying that they are not online. A large portion of the others even only have brief web experiences at friends' or family's houses.
There is often a separate jury fee that each applicant pays to have their submission reviewed by the acceptance committee (the Jury). It is not refundable and is usually larger than the actual value/cost of jurying so as to provide some extra revenue to the event, this is how the industry works as events doing this are not in the minority. They are a very few events who take this to far and ask for moderate to large fees, then have the goal of getting as many hundreds of applicants as possible for a show accepting a few dozen. Please inform me of any events like this on my site, I am not away of any at the moment, but these are rumored to exist. Jury fees should offset the expense of the jurying and can even bring in a small portion of the events overall revenue. It becomes stealing from artists if you're making more from your rejected folks' jury fees than the spot fees of the accepted.
I just created a new report online that calculates the avg jury fee from all our listings and shows you the stats of all event listings with an answer to the Jury Fee question. There were 16 percent with Jury Fees, the Mean (average) $25, the Median (most common) $20, and the Mode (middle value if all were in an ordered list) $10.
Number of Fees at Each Dollar Value: ( out of a total of abt 11k events, 2k asking for fees )
$3: 7
$5: 142
$10: 426
$15: 291
$20: 252
$25: 337
$30: 73
$35: 46
$40: 25
$45: 18
$50: 65
$60: 31
$70: 35
$80: 4
$90: 16
$100: 38
$125: 5
$150: 3
$175: 4
$200: 3
Smaller events, with less or no staff, will often only have the promoter and possibly a friend or two of theirs review applicants. Others yet might be consulted on particularly hard cases where an expert's eye is needed. Going all the way up in scale, there are the events with an actual Jury Panel composed of multiple people, hopefully with eyes for art, that sits down during planned sessions to review, discuss, and vote on each applicant. The best Juries are composed of art & craft experts from a variety of fields: Jewelry, Wood Working, Floral, Soap & Candles, etc.
Keeping track of votes, points, or whatever you choose to use can be done on forms you design and copy for each juror. They can then all do it together and debate each, or separately, at their leisure. As far as the details of how it works, I would gamble that every event is unique in their method. Here is a possibility: The form should have Not Handmade check-box with an area for reasons/comments so this can be used to disqualify them from the final vote. You can break assigning points down to a few categories/areas and later weigh them differently as an artist with a 10 in product quality & uniqueness and only a 2 in spot setup is probably more desirable than someone with a 2 in quality and 10 in setup... This is up to you to capture via your own magic tally formula! Watch, don't spill that beaker of acid! :-) Weir stuff will start to happen.
Ideas for Votable categories include:
Handmade
Is There Evidence of:
variations within brush strokes in lettering doll faces - GOOD
anything looking forged, molded, press cut, machine made – BAD
style consistency across diverse products types – GOOD
Someone with a distinctive dark red w & b flag design on signs, pails, shelves, wreathes, etc. has to at least paint it all themselves
style non-consistency across diverse products types – BAD
Someone with gemstone beaded stretch bracelets but only glass & feather earrings is likely not making at least one themselves
prices undercutting what it should take to make it by hand – BAD
very unusual designs, intricate, & correspondingly expensive - GOOD
Decide what your standards are
Some events do not even allow ceramics (mold made) or any beaded jewelry.
Some allow foreign made sweats and Ts that are embellished, others never.
Definitely Yes & reasons why
Definitely No & why
Definitely Mixed & why
What %? what items all handmade? What items all bought?
Which items are not AS handmade as is claimed? What are they actually
doing/adding to finish to each item?
Unsure & why
Match with show
Match with show, quality wise
Match with show, category wise
Match with show, price wise
Overall booth display quality
Table cloths, coverings
Top of the line – custom made or designer vs. Plain Generic Cloth, vs. Plastic
Non-Flat Display
Table shelves, racks, display cases
Floor racks, shelves, pegboards
Panel backgrounds, Hanging vs. Non-hanging pictures
Quality of Displays
Glass Cases vs. Cheap Plastic? Old, beaten up? Milk Crates?
Uniqueness of Setup – Does it stand out? As good or bad? ;-)
Overall product quality, uniqueness, & diversity
Product diversity, selection
Diversity within a category (bowls, tea cups, & serving plates) – Good
Diversity of many categories/media (jewelry & pottery & dip) - Bad
Category Uniqueness
Basket weavers are fewer in their count than jewelers, hence more valuable.
If you limit by category already or jury by category, this is not needed.
Uniqueness within Category – Cut porcelain plate jewelry scores above beaded
Product Quality
see handmade questions above!
To maintain impartiality, many events assign each incoming applicant a unique ID number that follows their submission through the process rather than their name. Only after all judging is done, are the selected artists' and crafters' names revealed. Obviously the person opening envelopes and assigning numbers should not be a juror.
Your jury panel should also try to continue to educate themselves on what the current state-of-the-art craft imports look like. This means trips to all the local ready-made craft resellers in your lifestyle malls and any non-juried events in your area. The event promoter should also order a copy of all the major import catalogs for the major companies for each craft category – search for these companies on Google – there are hundreds of huge companies out there with such product lines and catalogs. Some catalogs may cost $20 but will be well worth the value. Obviously order it as an individual, since you may never see it sent to the 'Appy Apple Arts Astravaganza'.... Each jury member should take each one home for a few nights to familiarize themselves with what is out there to be bought in bulk in all categories. There are even many promoters out there who spend countless weekends each year, and vast sums of money to travel to all the major trade shows & expos each year to keep up-to-date on the imports. These folks tell me that if they did not do that, their show would be over-run within a few years, as that is how fast they see imports improving and adapting.
It can be very difficult to identify what is hand made and what is not these days, if you are not an almost expert in that type of art or craft. This is where the workshop photos are priceless. If someone has a well stocked booth, they are not manufacturing it on their kitchen table, pick-nick table, driveway, deck, etc. Typically, they will need a well-used work area will be cluttered, even if cleaned for a photo, and should have all sorts of supplies in the background an an assortment of tools. No crafter is putting away their glue gun if they use it 100 times a day, and I bet there are some sticks near it, and it had better be gunked up too – used! Well-used work areas show signs of such use. If you do not see it, then no work is being performed there. If you have a confirmed work area sighting, that is not to say it belongs to the person sending in the picture, as they have been know to gut such photos other ways, but they may not make all their products or may not make them to the degree they claim. This is where knowledge of their particular craft is critical.
One of the most common tricks used to stage fake 'I make it myself' photos is the capturing on film of the dismantling ( aka – destruction ) of one of their items. Usually this can be noticed if the photos are looked at closely. There will be signs of the item being more damaged in less assembled states! If a basket is unwoven, you should see marks on the material as it is unwoven showing where it was winding in and out, squeezing intertween the verticals, the manhandled wicker will look curly, should have depressions, has finished edges, etc. If you have ever seen someone make a basket, the new material is PERFECTLY straight and long like reeds, lots of them at odd angles until they are all finally woven together. Likewise, jewelry taken apart will show more tool markings on the piece in the less assembled state, and almost none in the finished state. What a perpendicular universe, in which necklace jump rings that start out mangled and scratched become perfect circles after some rough tooling by unskilled digits, and solid sterling silver jewelry is forged with a lone pair of needle nose pliers and a spotlight, no magnifying glass, let alone metal-melting heat.
There are often hints that can give it away such as very little variation in style, color, and selection – while having thousands of products that look the same. Some true artists DO sometimes lack the variation you'd expect, so this alone should not taint someone, use it only as one criteria amongst many. My mom, for example, makes beaded gemstone jewelry and does change her styles up constantly, but at any given time whatever she enjoys making and sells well, she might make a ton of. This might result a new bracelet style of hematite mixed with tubes, but she might only make 2 variations from 2 types of stones for the tubes because she likes the look of those or has a lot of those tubes (my dad wholesales beads and she gets the unsellable, over ordered, etc ;-) So 40 of these appear on our money box Fri night in our 'new items to put out bag' and that weekend become proportionally more popular on our table till they dwindle and are replaced with my mom's next creations. We also have our standard, proven great selling items that we always try to have, usually we will have a few of these, to not would be stupid and bad business sense.
Most promoters are good if not absolutely great people! They are often volunteers, employees of non-profits, church event organizers, historical society personnel, chamber of commerces employees, or band moms, etc. As such, they would never themselves consider perpetrating they type of fraud that some vendors engage in by applying to strictly hand-made juried shows with a product line of all third-world-made gizzmoes. Sadly, these same promoters, since they would never imagine that someone WOULD try to do such a thing, do not always notice the most accomplished pervayors of imports that are masquerading their items as authentic. It must be known that there are many vendors that will send a juried event entirely false & fake workshop photos that are either well staged, of another vendor, or authentic to some degree, yet not of their main product, etc. Typically then, their items brought to sell will not resemble the ones their application represented. Some of these – go so far as to try to sell merchandise that is not even close in category to that described. A claimed potter with pictures of someone at a wheel may arrive with only beaded jewelry and 2 Mexican vases, if that. This IS happening these days to more and more promoters and this is why day-of inspection is crucial. You must forcibly remove any vendor that tries to pull this on you! Stick to your contract and your rules which they agreed to. Call the police if they refuse to leave. All your vendors will take note of how you handle the situation.
Some events let in all previously accepted vendors, unless there was a problem with them. A minority of events jury all past vendors and new applicants the same, so that previous vendors have no greater chance of being accepted. Some events that do let most vendors back in automatically still have a certain percentage that they try to rotate out every year while others have some variation of a few years in, then 1 year out, cycle.
There is another new report online now that calculates the average number of days for app deadlines before show start dates. This can only use the 'final' deadline that events listed with us, so any events that moved their deadline closer towards the start date, if they still needed more vendors, will have altered deadlines to appear closer than they actually were set to initially.. This skews all the deadline averages. The calculated stats are: Mean (average) Days Before 40.61, Median=18, Mode=1. With the mode (middle #) being 1, it means that half the deadlines are less than 1 day away, and half are more than one. With SO many close day before deadlines, the Mean of 40 days is probably very low.
Number of Events with Deadlines x Weeks in Advance:
1 weeks: 27.9% - 3837
2 weeks: 15.1% - 2084
3 weeks: 11.7% - 1614
4 weeks: 7.1% - 979
5 weeks: 6.9% - 955
6 weeks: 4.2% - 582
7 weeks: 3.4% - 463
8 weeks: 2.6% - 351
9 weeks: 2.5% - 341
10 weeks: 1.9% - 258
11 weeks: 1.6% - 215
12 weeks: 1.6% - 221
13 weeks: 1.1% - 158
14 weeks: 1.3% - 174
15 weeks: 1.2% - 171
16 weeks: 1.0% - 133
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