With an air of uncertainty surrounding the country we set off for the bright lights of the City , and headed for the Summer Olympia fine art and antiques fair , the fair dates also coincided with another two large antique fairs in central London including the highly acclaimed Masterpiece , I personally saw this as a positive as people could come to three fairs in one day, and so it proved with much migration evident between the fairs.
On the flipside of that the preview evening clashed with the opening day of Wimbledon and the mighty England playing the relative minnows of Iceland,( in what was described as football match ?) , well the understandable negative thoughts and trepidation were soon forgotten as sales got underway in what felt like a full house preview, we opened at 16.00 hrs and soon registered sales to a strong UK and Foreign contingent , as expected mostly trade and collectors, a very satisfactory opening night only ruined by our last minute dash to the hotel to witness the tail end of yet another England football humiliation .
As the weeks sales steadily racked up it soon became evident that the European and foreign collectors were feeling rather flush and in a spending mood ,our numerous German clients were getting a much cheaper pound for their Euro , it also transpired that our regular Japanese clients had managed to negotiate about a 20% uplift in their currency exchange , they very quickly created large holes in our display ,which was most welcome, and subsequently returned the following day for another much larger slice of the cake, the week culminated with a strong presence of new and existing private clients findings homes for some of our larger items .
Overall ,and despite all the doom and gloom predicted by the media , we had a fantastic time, worked hard and met some lovely new clients along the way, very satisfied, a big thank you must go to the organisers and marketing team, and everyone who visited us to share their most welcome feedback and compliments, roll on Winter Olympia !!