Colourful arrays of glass and a method for mailing loose tea were the big winners Friday at the P.E.I. Craft and Giftware Buyers’ Market at the Charlottetown Civic Centre.
Lady Baker’s Tea Trolley owner Katherine Burnett walked away with best new product for a tea-filled postcard while Random Pieces Glassworks owner Laura Cole took the best booth award for her bright display of glasswork.
It was Burnett’s first year at the trade show and she said the postcard was something simple, yet a great way for her to advertise.
“It’s affordable for tourists to send a postcard from P.E.I. and say ‘enjoy this tea,’” she said.
The buyer’s market is a wholesale trade show for craft and giftware producers.
This year’s show featured more than 50 producers including potters, painters, jewelry makers who showed off their products to retailers from Atlantic Canada.
Burnett normally sells her teas at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market, but after her win her booth at the trade show was busy with a steady stream of potential customers who were sniffing jars of loose tea and checking out her wares, including the postcards.
She got the idea for the postcard after seeing a much larger package used to send tea through the mail and while she had also seen cards with tea bags inside them, Burnett said she wanted to use loose leaves instead.
“I’m for loose leaf tea. The taste and quality are so much better,” she said.
Burnett said she didn’t know she was going to submit something for best new product but was asked to the day before the trade show started and she was pleasantly surprised when she won.
“I hope it will bring on the business.”
For Cole, who coincidentally shared a table with Burnett during the buyer’s market luncheon, it was the second time she won for best booth in the five or six years she has attended the trade show.
Her pieces range from simple displays of coloured glass to more intricate mosaics pieced together in reclaimed window frames and Cole said the trick was trying to properly light them because they normally hang in windows.
“I designed my booth to showcase colour,” she said.
To help show off the vibrant colours Cole used light boxes for some of her pieces while others hung in front of dark fabric to show potential buyers what her work would look like in different settings.
Cole said she was happy about her win this year.
“This is a fabulous show and a great place to get good exposure to lots of new people and people that we’ve already been working with,” she said.
Culture P.E.I. executive director Henk van Leeuwen was one of two judges for this year’s market and said there were many great new products but it was something simple that caught their attention.
“Sometimes something that’s clean and simple in form stands out,” he said.
As for the best booth, van Leeuwen said the judges liked the combination of how Cole presented her product and her creative use of lighting.
“It was very eye catching.”
