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CRICUT MOUNTAIN MAKE-A-THON EVENT IN SALT LAKE CITY
Can you believe it’s been 4 whole months since we were invited to be guest speakers at the Cricut Mountain Make-A-Thon event in Salt Lake City, Utah and we haven’t even blogged about it yet? How on earth did that happen?
After a late night, early morning and long flight, we finally made it to my most favourite city in the whole wide world, Salt Lake. You might remember we’d attended the event as influencers last year, but never in our wildest dreams did we think we’d be asked to return as guest speakers the following year. This time the event was to be held at the Grand America’s sister hotel, ‘The Little America‘ which was just as fancy. As soon as we got to the hotel we headed to the event registration where we were able to collect all the equipment we’d hired ready to make our workshop spaces come to life.
The first class we taught would be part of a round robin style class where attendees would make their way around each booth, spending 10-15 minutes learning a new skill, that would help them sell their products should they be interested or to share in the brand new Cricut community. Our workshops aimed to help students pose with wearable items such as hats and bags, whilst Jess showed them how to edit photos to look pro simply using a mobile phone.
First things first we needed an amazing photo backdrop. We wanted our booth to reflect the tropical themed cocktail evening we would be having with the rest of the guest speakers that evening, so we used our Cricut Maker to cut monstera leaves and palm fronds in pastel coloured card and just for good measure, a 2.5 ft bright pink cardboard flamingo, which we stuck to a white backdrop. With a little help from some glue dots we finally managed to get the whole thing up before heading bleary eyed, back to our rooms to get ready for the welcome party.
That evening we were super excited to see fellow brit blogger Mike, founder of the Crafty Gentlemen and his partner Gareth. if you haven’t read his blog yet, go check it out! We couldn’t wait to have a proper catch up and arranged to have dinner with the UK Cricut team the following night, then it was finally time for bed to sleep off some of that jet lag.
The next few days were a blur of classes and people but it was so much fun! The event was kicked off by CEO Ashish, who as always knows how to get the party started! Then the hard work began as the next 48 hours would see us teach 25 classes. By the end of it I had no voice, my throat was sore and I felt like my feet were about to fall off but oh my goodness wasn’t it fun. I was so surprised that almost every single one of the attendees at our classes were willing to give the poses a try and I think you’ll agree from the photos above, that they all did a fantastic job! We even got to see everyone’s edited photos after the class on Instagram when they used #cricutmountainmakeathon.
On the final day we were guest speakers in a different session which was all about starting an Etsy business. It felt surreal talking to a room full of people about creating a successful Etsy business when our shop was only a year old, (talk about #impostersyndrome) but it was also extremely humbling. To think that just 18 months previous, we’d been seriously questioning the future of our business and now we were both earning a full time living on making products alone, made me extremely proud of what we’d achieved in such a small amount of time.
Later on that night we went out to dinner with the UK Cricut team and I had a pinch me moment. I realised 6 years previously this same group of people (almost) had sat in a small pub in the Cotswolds having our very first meeting about a potential partnership. Who would have known that meeting would have led to us flying half way around the world to teach people how to sell products they too were making with their Cricut machines. I wondered how many of those students would have the same experience as us in 6 years time? Life really can be funny sometimes.
The closing session was emotional to say the least. The creative minds behind the Cricut displays spoke about all the work that had gone into making everything we could see, from tassel earrings and shoe embellishments to toddlers outfits and wedding table decorations, the team had put so much hard work into creating such an amazing event that truly had brought people together from all over the world, all of which had one thing in common – their love of crafting. We will be forever grateful to Cricut for helping us get our business to where it is today. And we thank them for their continual support. We love you guys and hope to see you again next year!
Images by Bespoke Bride and Austin Diamond Photography
