Rachael’s Tale of the Jaftex Video Contest

The Jaftex Video Contest – We are in it to win it! Will You help us?

About a month ago Scott Fortunoff from Jaftex Corporation started telling us about a video contest that his company was going to be sponsoring starting in August. In fact, he didn’t just talk about it, he began to harp on it, and nag about it, and remind us, and in other words, annoy those of us retailers in his own private retail store Facebook (FB) group, to consider making a 10 minute video to introduce our store to the big wide world out there! #jaftexvideochallenge

He gave us pointers over the past 3 and a half weeks, and encouraged us to view last year’s winning video, which garnered over 120,000 views (that’s amazing) for a non-viral FB video.

I started to think about it and Becky encouraged me to consider making a video for the store.

We chatted a bit about the rules, and whether I could find something to say, or rather, something to focus on about our store. This video needed to be a general, informational video, not one showing specific fabrics. You all know how fast some of our fabrics sell out - like 10 minutes after a live feed, sometimes! So, we couldn’t do anything specific, at least not lots of specific fabrics!

So, I put it in my mental mill and went on about my merry way, filling orders, writing emails and otherwise, continuing my crazy life filled with fabric, emails and more fabric! (It’s a fun life now!)

The contest was slated to begin Aug. 1, and was scheduled to continue all the way through to Aug. 29, 2020. In order to get the most views, Scott told us, we should consider doing a live feed to get momentum going as FB tends to show live feeds a lot more than pre-recorded videos, and we all know how odd the algorithms can be at FB, making it impossible to see some things and other things you see over and over and over again! We needed every free boost we could get!

By Wednesday afternoon (of last week) I had figured that if we did a live feed, first thing on Saturday, that we could make a 10 min. video at 9 a.m. ET and still open the store at 9:30 as promised. Scott had encouraged us to do a run through, but who has time for run throughs?

I told our wonderful staff that we were going to have to straighten up the entire store on Friday after we finished filling orders. And they went to work. We each tackled part of the store, straightening, fixing and removing clutter. Of course, like good “homemakers” some of our clutter was just stuffed away out of sight.

Of course many other things kept interrupting us, say, like getting 2 more fabric deliveries, taking the scads of mail to the post office, and we had to get ready for the Tuesday birthday bash, which involved moving thousands of small remnant pieces down to the sewing shop and organizing lots by color.

Lots of pieces

But we kept plugging away at both things - setting up and cleaning up

But we kept plugging away at the shelves. Every time our arms would grow weary of throwing heavy bolts around up high, we’d find something “down low” to fix.

This was our messiest shelf before hand,because it’s our busiest shelf — our blenders and our solids! Cheryl put a good 40 minutes into straightening those 3 shelves. They look marvelous!

And so we left on Friday night, exhausted, but with a beautiful store. I took multiple pictures, because it looked so nice!

Saturday morning, I got here bright and early, in a quest to finish out with the few neatening up areas that I had not gotten done on Friday (Straightening up the Elastic, vacuuming the floor and counter clutter!)

 I had sent out an email to our customers who get the emails that we’d go live at 9 a.m. ET.

At 8:40 a.m. I figured I should get a general idea of what we wanted to do, and we decided at that point to just “wing it.”  We couldn’t even walk through it. We barely talked through it. In fact, we decided, “This is how we’ll start” and we set a timer on Ken’s phone. You can probably hear it about 8 minutes in, if you listen to it again! It’s right when I was by the brown and gray fabrics, that his alarm was going off. We had a false start, so I knew we had more time!

We would walk around the store, entering as though we were guests, and just go from there. We give tours daily in our store to the new customers who walk in, so a customer tour is NOT at all unusual for us. We knew we had to keep it to 10 minutes, and that would be the hard part. However, we had each other to encourage us to keep moving.

 We also needed to feature Jaftex’s fabrics since it was THEIR contest, and we certainly have enough Jaftex fabrics (StudioE, Blank Quilting, 3 Wishes, Henry Glass, FreeSpirit and AE Nathan, as well as Stof and Syke.) I quickly looked up some of those fabrics on the computer, and we planned which ones to pull out. Of course we did NOT have time to do most of the ones that we had planned.

This farm fabric sold out minutes after we showed it.

Before we knew it, it was 8:50 a.m. ET and time to get the tablet and camera booted up!

Then it was 8:59 and time to get in place. After a false start, we got our act together and created the video that we ended up with, but it was 5 seconds too long. The rules clearly stated “under 10 minutes” and it was 10:04. Thankfully, after I got it posted, Becky was able to get on and trim off a couple of seconds from the front and 3 seconds off the back of the video, so we didn’t get eliminated right from the start!

 Then, the hard work began. We had our busy Saturday at the store, and I didn’t have much time to think about the video. However, at the end of the day, I popped on to the FB page and saw that we were up to about 1200 views. That was exciting for me, but a super long ways from 3000, which I figured we need each day, in order to get to that goal of 120,000.

So, Becky asked her group (THANK YOU!) and I sent out an appeal to the email list and by late Sunday night, we had 10,000 views! It was a fabulous start to our Video contest! As of this writing, we’re at 15,000 views and we need more. LOTS more.

Please Share. Share and share again! Watch it. Memorize it. Play it over again, please.

We want you to visit us and quote it for us! Tell others about us. Find where Ken’s alarm went off! Share our store with friends. Put it on your yard sale groups as a great place to get mask fabric! Tell everyone you know about us. Ask them to watch at least 30 seconds of the video!

We are the serious underdogs in this contest, being the newbies in this business. So, here’s the video link for you!

Becky has promised another round of fabulous prizes if we win and she’ll hopefully be here in Florida at the end of August, to help get those to you, if we win! So, the grand prize is $1200 in fabric credit, and that means, MORE fabulous fabric for you at incredible prices! And this time, we want to share these prizes with YOU, our cyber friends!

We appreciate your support and love helping you to save money! So, if you can help us win this contest, well, we’d be very, very grateful for you! EVERY time you view the video, it counts!

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