About my Time at Painted Tree

Written by: Callie

One of our most popular blog posts is my post about starting a booth inside Painted Tree. And we have a lot of people send an email asking about how it went so I thought I would finally make a full post about my time there!

DISCLAIMER: This is all about my own personal experience at one particular Painted Tree in 2019. Things could be vastly different now. But this was my experience from years ago.

If you want the quick answer - I unfortunately, did not make money and therefore thought it was not worth it. But keep reading for the long version.

Getting the booth was fairly easy for the Painted Tree I applied to. They had quite a few open booths available immediately so there wasn’t a long waiting list like I know that some Painted Trees have. They let me decorate the walls however I wanted, which was nice and if you’re handy you can make it really unique! So some vendors had arches going above the booth space so they could hang things, some had fencing boards all around the walls of theirs, so that was fun to be able to make it your own.

The major plus side that I found of Painted Tree was that they don’t require you to work at the store, they fully staff it. They are open a good amount of hours (some places I’ve been a vendor in are only open 4 days a week for limited hours). And they handle the sales tax side of things.

Now on to some of the more prominent downsides. The first is that they are not responsible for missing or damaged items. Which is fine, they tell you up front but when one of my large outdoor Connect 4 pieces got broken it just hurt a little to have to take it out of the booth with no one paying for the damages. Most Painted Trees are also massive so there’s no one with eyes on your booth very often. I know a few of my items were stolen but I’m sure even more were (I wasn’t good at keep track of the inventory I had in the booth so not real sure on the exact things that went missing).

And then on to the most disappointing part of my experience I made no money. And I don’t mean like, oh I only made like $100 this month. I mean I literally made zero dollars. The whole time I was there. Some months I was able to almost cover the full amount of rent with the money I made but most months I didn’t make enough so I was paying nearly $250/month to just store my stuff at the booth.

I will say that I don’t think my products were well suited for a store like Painted Tree. A lot of my items are customized and they just don’t make much sense when they’re generic (like a wedding card holder). So I think that if you have products that are more universal, maybe like skincare, candles, home decor, stuff like that, I think that you would have a much better go at it! There are a ton of people that do make a good chunk of change selling at Painted Tree and just because I couldn’t make it work definitely does not mean that you can’t!

So all in all that was a failed endeavor for me. But has that stopped me from renting booth space in other stores? Hell no! I haven’t learned my lesson yet and currently have a few items in one store and a whole booth with my mom at another here in town. The full booth we have has made money in the 4 days we’ve been there so I have high hopes! I’ll write about these new ventures soon hopefully!

If you have any additional questions feel free to still ask away!