Discovering your market abroad – A fair will help

Willing to go abroad with your creation?  But how to be sure is the product suitable to the market, or do you need to do changes, do you need to add services to the product, or do you need to consider totally different approach, if product or service is not appropriate to the market. Or is the market right for your product at all?

Going to the fair is one option, especially for designers – it is a good way to get some feedback to the product.

There are several suitable design fairs in Nordic countries. Creative  Estonia can suggest for example Formland in Danmark, Formex in Sweden, Habitare in Finland, Oslo Design Fair in Norway and Disainiturg in Estonia.

Preparing your stand  has to start already at least half a year before the fair. You have to think through the layout, what products do you display, how to ship your products, what kind of contacts would you like to get, send out invitations to your stand, what kind of infomaterials you have to produce beforehand, how to manage the contacts afterwards etc.

Any feedback is good – it might happen that nobody is interested in your product or, there is a huge success. Creative Estonia took a most famous estonian jewellery designer to Habitare in Finland – and  to our surprise finnish people were not intersted. But the desinger  met an agent from Japan and received a huge contract to sell his creations there. And vice a versa  – one product we were sceptical to take with us was a great success and the examples were all sold out in couple of hours.

So, our opinion is – attending to the fair is one of the best options to test the market.