WESTERN BUREAU — The marketing and advertising opportunities for vendors at the annual Red Stripe Reggae Sumfest show is what keeps them returning each year, despite low sales/profits in some years.

The vendors say the show, which attracts thousands of people from all across the island and the world each year, allows them to not only increase their client base, but to also identify the needs of their customers.

Clasford Woolery Jr, the owner/operator of First Choice Videos and Adult Toys in Montego Bay, is one such vendor. Positioned on a section of the counter of the booth shared with his friend, Gregory Samuels, who sells meals, was a television set that served to advertise the assortment of reggae videos sold at his store. And available to all customers, save children, who visit the booth are pamphlets detailing the range of adult (sex) toys and other service offerings at the store.

“Sumfest is a good medium for my product,” Woolery told the Observer, adding that some 20 to 30 per cent of his clientele had been drawn from the Sumfest show over the years.

Initially, he said, people knew little, if anything of his product offerings, but through Sumfest that had been remedied.

“I would take my business cards (to the show in the early days) and issue them to people like old school friends and the word got around. (Then) with the name adult toys added to my company, I started taking a television and a DVD player,” he said.

“And for the last three years it helped me in terms of people actually looking at a tape and asking ‘where can I get a tape of that nature’. They thought, for example, that we only had stage shows. They never knew of go-go tapes and even sometimes I would sell the one I take there. So now I carry a wide variety of dancehall tapes,” he added.

Craft vendor Radcliffe Hamilton, who operates a craft shop in Negril, has also benefited from the marketing and advertising opportunities at Sumfest. It’s part of the reason he has been attending the show for the past 11 years.

After paying $15,000 for booth space last year, he said, he made a profit amounting only to $10,000.

“But it’s not all the time the sales are bad. Plus I meet different people and my business is advertised,” he told this newspaper.

Trudy Brown, who has her craft business based in Savanna-la-mar but who also operates out of Negril, Montego Bay and Ocho Rios, also lauded the show’s advertising benefits.

“It advertises you,” she said. “People come and they ask you where you are based and where they can find you. It gives you good exposure.”