Red Hat Craft Fair: A huge success for salsa and books

Red Hat Craft FairOn Thursday, December 12, I participated in my first Red Hat Craft Fair. It’s an event held at Red Hat headquarters where the crafty folks or their spouses/family members get a chance to sell their home goods to Red Hatters. I thought it would be a good idea to sell my book and my salsa. It turned out to be a good idea.

First, my book was primed for an open source audience. And there is no better place than the HQ of the open source leader to promote a book about Raleigh being an open source city. My goal was to sell at least 10 books, with a stretch goal of 20 books. I met my goal and sold 10 copies of the book…inching closer to 500 total copies sold. I had free “Open source all the cities” stickers and bookmarks available—which turned out to be a big hit. You can score your copy at http://theopensourcecity.com/.

I went back and forth on selling my homemade salsa. After a record year in the garden, I decided to share the fruits of my labor at the Red Hat Craft Fair. I had mango salsa, pineapple salsa, four-pepper mango salsa (4pm), and late harvest pineapple-mango salsa. I ended up selling 15 pints and sold out of the 4pm salsa. I’m glad I brought in the pints and everyone that stopped by seemed to enjoy the free samples of pineapple salsa. I might be on to something here. But with a limited supply, I’m thinking it has to be just like Beaujolais Nouveau—only available around Thanksgiving and a limited supply. Hit me up if you want to purchase a pint of salsa before the season ends.

Huge shout-out to Mike Esser for organizing and making the Red Hat Craft Fair happen.

This entry was posted in book, Holidays, Open source, Raleigh and tagged , , , , , on by .

About Shibby

Jason Hibbets is a senior community architect at Red Hat which means he is a mash-up of a community manager and project manager. At night, he wears his cape and is a captain for the Open Raleigh brigade, as well as a co-chair for NC Open Pass. Jason is the author of a book titled The foundation for an open source city--a resource for cities and citizens interested in improving their government through civic hacking. While writing the book, he discovered his unknown superpower of building communities of passionate people. Jason graduated from North Carolina State University and resides in Raleigh, NC with his wife, two kids, two border collies, chickens, lots of tomato plants, and a lazy raccoon somewhere in an oak tree. In his copious spare time, he enjoys surfing, running, gardening, traveling, watching football, sampling craft beer, and participating in local government--not necessarily in that order, but close to it. You can follow him on Twitter: @jhibbets

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