How to Start: Thinking outside the box (or the tent)

The story behind the blowup hat tent.

Back in 2014, I had started the Sh*t That I Knit instagram handle and was daydreaming about how I could somehow get people to pay me for the sh*t I had knit vs. just knitting gifts for friends and coworkers. That lead me to apply to SOWA Open Market for the last two weekends of October.

I was THRILLED when I got “accepted”… aka they had an available booth and sent me a bill for $350 a weekend. It meant that I had to work up an inventory over the summer (read in between the lines: also force my mom to knit with me in this endeavor) and figure out how I would display our wares. Everyone at SOWA had one of those pop-up tents, so I got one from Walmart along with a 6 foot table, a tablecloth, and a rinky-dink sign from Vistaprint. My mom and I didn’t realize until the night before that you had to have weights for these tents, so we filled shopping bags with dumbells and figured that would do the trick.

Making that tent setup look good or professional was not easy. No matter what I did, it always looked so homegrown and the branded image I had in my head did not come to life.

Fast forward to November of 2016, I attended my first Killington World Cup Race with Alex in tow. We showed up on a freezing, windy, snowy morning and struggled to get the Walmart tent up. I had grid walls to hang hats from and they kept blowing over. I also forgot a tablecloth and had to borrow (steal) one from the Food + Beverage team… so it was black and def had ketchup on it. Long story short, it wasn’t the best look.

Woof!! This was the setup at my first Killington race. Thankfully I had BEAUTIFUL model friends for big posters - but other than that, it was rough.

I came home from that experience thinking… there just has to be a better way. Why does everyone use these same awful tents?! They are heavy and awkward to carry. You need more than one person to set them up. Once they’re set up, it’s almost always underwhelming. And then I got the idea. I was like, what if this tent could be like a massive beanie?! And what if it… blew up?! That way you wouldn’t jam your finger in the metal poles again!! (If you know me, you know I have very long delicate fingers - very afraid of jamming them!!)