Trading at the Glastonbury Festival — Sarah Turner Eco Art & Design

Our First Glastonbury…

We are of course still gutted that another year passes and we are unable to go to our favourite place, the Glastonbury Festival. So instead of moping, counting down the days till our next opportunity to go, I thought I would write a blog post about our first Glastonbury experience giving a bit of the behind the scenes look from a traders perspective...

*CAD mock-up of what our pitch would look like at Glasto 2015*

The Application

It was at the end of 2014 when I applied for Glastonbury. Myself and my partner had never even attended a proper music festival before and really wanted to give it a try. Other fellow creatives who had traded at them before said they thought my work would sell well and I should really give it a go. So I decided to put in my application for the festival which was on our bucket list, Glastonbury. Despite the application asking for quite a lot of information about previous festival trading experience, including detailed photos of your stall set up, this didn’t make me twig that it was perhaps not for first timers! I tried my best to do a mock-up of how our pitch would look and a couple of months later was ecstatic at receiving our offer to trade!

Setting up our pitch

So we packed the van, loaded the roof box and turned up on the Monday ready to set up our pitch. We had an old grubby catering marquee with a big hole burnt into the side and an air bed to sleep on in the van.

*Plastic bottle lights, flowers and can artworks at Glastonbury 2015*

Meeting the neighbours

The traders at Glastonbury tend to be the same each year so our neighbours were intrigued as to who the new kids were. After friendly introductions they informed us that the people who had our pitch the year before were kicked out for trying to sell poppers on the sly! We reassured them that we weren’t selling anything dodgy! They then asked what festivals we had done before as they hadn’t seen us on the circuit. When we informed them of our complete lack of experience their response was as you’d expect…. ‘You wanted to try trading at music festivals so you thought you’d start with Glastonbury?!’ So it turns out trading at smaller more local festivals is the way your supposed to start out and it certainly makes sense. Perfect your pitch set up, payment system, signage, product, displays etc, then move onto the more grander events. But hey, we do always tend to do things a bit differently so why should festival trading be any different?!

Power Ballad Yoga!

So our first Glasto was a bit of a whirlwind but it’s fair to say it blew our minds! There is just so much to see and do. Being a trader we of course have to man the stall but the 4 of us do this in shifts and we close up at 9ish so we have lots of time to enjoy the festival too.

Our first amazing Glasto experience was on the very first morning. As we were eating breakfast in our makeshift kitchen behind our pitch we heard Purple Rain by Prince booming out from the field next door and went to investigate. Power Ballad Yoga was what we discovered, run by an incredible performer named Miss Kitty Shark-Ra. There was pretty much no yoga going on and mostly involved dancing to power ballads and hugging random strangers (unthinkable in todays Covid world!) We thought if the rest of the festival is anything like this then we are in for a treat!

The Arcadia Show

You think of the music when you think of a festival but at Glastonbury there was so much else to do. We found we lived in the comedy tent at the end of the night, watching hilarious comedians we’d never heard of along with others we’d seen on the telly. The Arcadia Show was an experience we will never forget. Watching a huge mechanical spider shoot fire and electricity out coupled with the incredible performances from the aerial artists!

Sustainable Trader of the Year Award

On the very last morning we had a surprise visit from the market manager asking us questions about our sustainability credentials and ethos behind the business. She informed me that I had been nominated for Sustainable Trader of the Year and she was here to decide whether it should be me or another nominated trader. After an agonising couple of hours wait until she returned with a bottle of champagne and a banner, we had WON! I was more than pleased with the champagne and couldn’t believe my luck that the actual prize was a free pitch at the next years festival. This was incredible for us. It had been a great experience but the other traders were correct, you definitely need more experience, perfect your set up before attempting the larger events. We had barely sold enough to cover the pitch fee so to have a free pitch the following year was such a great opportunity. We used some of the money we would have spent on the pitch fee to buy a fresh new marquee and made lovely display furniture and a gorgeous new sign. We learnt a lot from our first Glastonbury trading experience and on our return we made double the money than our first year ensuring it was financially worth it this time.

Our youngest team member

We’ve been back each year since, and are officially on the Glasto map, literally… check out Kate Chidley’s incredible illustrated festival maps!

In 2019 we brought along an extra little person along. He is definitely a little raver and we loved introducing him to the other traders… our festival family. We can’t wait to bring him each year and have him grow up in the festival community.

*Inside our new and improved stall in 2019*

What would we do differently?

I do wish we had some more experience at smaller local events first but then someone else would have been offered our great pitch with lovely neighbours and we would have missed out. It’s very competitive to trade at Glastonbury and I look back to how rubbish my application form must have been with no actual photos of our set up and just a mock-up of how it would look. But evidently the market managers liked our ethos, saw we had potential and were willing to take the risk on us. For taking that risk and giving us our awesome award, I am extremely grateful!