Starting Out in Wholesale

Sigh* This has been theeee most tiring experience. Getting everything set up and formatted correctly, being bent over my desk or in my case my bed painting for long hours at a time can give a bit of a back cramp. My number one advice I would give anyone taking place in a trade show is plan in advance. I was told to do this and I did but I had a lot of delays and worries trying to figure out the formatting for to print.

Back in February 2026 I signed up to go to my first ever trade show. It was something I always wanted to do and knew about for years but never gave it a second thought. I first stumbled across the name Top Drawer four years ago when I stumbled on ICKA prints instagram post and even then for some reason I thought: ‘oh she won a position to do her first trade show, how lovely.” But all this would change, last year when TIKTOK kept suggesting people in England who had gone to trade shows and I paid attention this time. I learnt that it was really ordinary individuals like myself who were trying to make a living from their creativity and took the plunge to attend a trade show the reviews were interesting in a good way so in February of this year I signed up.

I stumbled across a few blogs on the subject but im here to tell you more of what I’ve learnt so far if a trade show is something you would like to also do.

1.) Plan your stand around what you already have - You don’t have to overcomplicate it for it to be presentable and effective. I wish I had tape this to my heart before I started painting. My initial aim was to launch with a number that filled most of the shell space but I quickly realised that’s not very practical. You don’t have to have 70 to 100 products to launch. Start with what you have for me this included: a printer, printing paper, around twenty original artworks which I plan to make into both prints and greeting cards, sticker paper which i’m sure will come in handy for the shell walls. I also have pre-folded flat greeting card stock. I will be adding around 30 Christmas cards so I will be launching with a minimum of 50 greeting cards and 20 A3 prints.

2.) Plan for delays : Plan for delays of all sorts. This could be family, friends, health, missed deliveries, laptop stopped working and so forth. In my case it was my scanner and formatting that took up the majority of my time. I took close to three weeks figuring out how to make my scans look similar to my originals. You see I bought a CanoCanon Lide 300 and it works wonderfully with scanning my watercolour, oils and acrylic paintings, but the scans washed out all of my 20 plus originals artwork that had fluorescent pinks, fluorescent orange inks or paints in them. Hours on the phone with Canon didn’t help as I found that the scanner I have just doesn’t work in capturing these hues. Desperate me decided to grab my digital pen and correct each hue digitally but thankfully by the grace of God I stumbled across a CCD scanner! So do think about the kind of materials you use when painting your artwork and what scanner would work with it. I also had a few family and friends emergencies and unseen commitments that needed dealing with which also ate away at the few weeks I had left.

3.) Formatting each card: After I found a scanner that works with my originals I scanned in over 20 pieces and immediately saved them on my google drive just incase my new laptop stop working. Im selling A6 size cards when folded and using photoshop to add text to some of them. I saved all my work as CMYK PDFs. So before you save anything change your work to CMYK. Im using photoshop so in photoshop this is how it is done. Go up to Image > Mode > CMYK.

To save here is how I saved all of my work. File > Save A Copy>( a box comes up - I untick layers and untick embed colour profile). See below. In the Format box select: photoshop PDF>Save (another box comes up which I have taken a screen grab of to show you.

After I click save another box pops up. Just click ok which pulls up the below box.

4.) Money: I will go into this in a bit more detail in another post but for now here is a brief idea of the things you may want to put aside money for your greeting cards/product (how many are you planning on bringing). I will be printing my own as I have less than a week to go before the show. I have bought the inks for my printer so hopefully there’s no technical mishaps. I‘m also bringing prints as I have a Canon pixma ix 6850 printer which prints beautifully but eat ink like no tomorrow. You don’t need to get a printer but having one helps when you need the product now.

I scanned all my originals at 400 DPI and set the scanner to save it directly as a pdf file. When I open this file in photoshop, photoshop may drop the DPI to 399.(something) but don’t worry your 400 DPI scan is still there and this will not affect the final products quality.

Then click save PDF

5.) What type of painter are you: Think about if you paint quickly or need time to come up with new ideas for a card. For some hilarious reason I struggle to paint after not picking up a paint brush for two to three months. So I was completing two to three painting a day to the point I had to stay up painting up to 1 am. I was also taking much longer than I thought I would but now that I have less than 6 art pieces to go I’m literally breezing through each piece. Today, however, I felt extremely tired. I wanted to scan in 30 plus art pieces to start formatting them to print but had to sit down. I was too tired and a bit overwhelmed by all the things I still have to do. I also know when I get to the show I would see I didn’t have to think so much.

6.) Top Drawer : The team will call you as they did with me today, just to see how you’re getting on and if you have everything. You’ll get lots of email from them just read them. Don’t be like me - read the m-a-n-u-a-l. I literally found out today that I need to purchase a vis yellow jacket or I won’t be allow to set up next week. My brain was more focus on the product as without them what do I have to show.

7.) Do take breaks - you’re no good if you’re too tired. Step away from the work and go for a walk, call a friend and talk about nothing for hours, etc.