Craft shows are a unique way to shop and vendors can get creative with their setup. But there are certain things craft show shoppers shouldn't see.
Fall of 2012 marked our first experience as an art vendor, at Cooper Young Festival in Memphis, TN. Over the years, we’ve padded our resume with quite a few more shows and experimented with a LOT of trial and error on our vendor booth layout and setup. We’ve learned a lot, both from our own experiences and from looking to other vendors for inspiration. Today, we’re going to share with you our top 16 ideas for selling at art festivals, craft fairs and indie markets. These tips can be summed up into three key categories: Booth Display, Signage/Décor and—the most important—Branding. FIRST, LET'S DIVE INTO VENDOR BOOTH DISPLAY. 1. Plan out your booth space BEFORE the day of your festival. Before we set foot at an art festival, our vendor booth is completely laid out. We measure all our display pieces (shelves, tables, etc.) and configure the space to help speed up the set up time. Plus, not all shows have the same options for booth sizes (because that would just be too easy). This year, our Cooper Young booth featured a 10’ x 15’ space, while some of our holiday shows ranged from a 6’ x 8’ space to a 10’ x 20’ double booth. It helps to lay everything out beforehand to know what will or will not fit in the allotted space. Once everything is measured, we use Adobe Illustrator to plan out the booth space, with everything to scale. We print out copies to take with us during set up, as well as email a copy to ourselves in case we lose the paper copies (it happens). Here's a look at my Adobe Illustrator artboard for our most recent Cooper Young Festival vendor booth: And here is our finished vendor booth, based on that original mock up: 2. Display vertically. When potential buyers pass your vendor booth, they’re not seeing product that is flat on tables. At least some of your work needs to be in their line of sight. One way we add height to our booth display is with these adjustable white metal shelf units we found at IKEA (shop them here). The shelves are completely adjustable and IKEA sells individual shelves, so you can add to the original four included. We switch it up depending on what art we need to display at each festival or market. In the past, we've used these custom built white-washed wood displays on rollers, which our brother built for us. We love how they look in our booth, as they mimic a more retail-style setting. However, these are rather heavy and bulky to transport. Looking for something a little more transport friendly, this year we commissioned a custom white wood peg wall. The unit breaks down into four separate pieces, so it's easy and convenient for traveling. Everything hooks together via large bolts and wing nuts, with the shelves and pegs packed separately. It's also completely adjustable, as the pegs can be configured in various ways. This wall unit is great for displaying our larger 5 panel wood pieces, which serve as great eye catchers for potential buyers walking by our vendor booth. For smaller shows, we take just two of the four wall panels, usually paired with one of the white IKEA shelf units. Bonus: extra pegs are great for hanging ornaments! Clear acrylic risers are also a great way to subtly add height and levels when displaying artwork on a table. Because they're clear, they don't take away from your displayed art. We use combinations of this 5 piece set from Displays2Go. 3. Choose display colors that will make your work pop. As you can see, for our larger display pieces (shelves, walls), we incorporate as much white as possible. Because all sides of our wood art is stained in a dark finish, the white background helps it pop. We also prefer how clean the white and neutral hues look. 4. Store and display multiple art prints. We have ALL-CAPS-STRUGGLED with how to display and store our art prints, other than stuffing them in baskets for browsing. We recently discovered these gold wire baskets from IKEA that slide on perfectly to our white IKEA shelves. They are great at storing stacks of prints! To actually display the prints, we chopped up a 4” x 4” piece of lumber and sawed angled grooves down the top. We stained them to match the color of our wood art. The art prints stand up perfectly in the grooves of the wood, which we then prop up above the wire baskets. It’s easy for buyers to see the print displayed and simply pick it up from the basket underneath for purchase. 5. Use slim Christmas trees to display holiday ornaments. During our holiday shows, our Christmas ornaments are HUGE sellers. While we use our peg wall for some ornament overflow, ornaments look best hanging on an actual Christmas tree. This also better demonstrates to potential buyers how it will look on their own tree. However, for those smaller booth spaces, a full Christmas tree takes up too much valuable real estate and just isn't practical. And some of the smaller, table-top trees aren’t known for being sturdy. Because our ornaments are on the heavier side, we've had issues with the smaller trees tipping over ... especially when buyers are trying to take the ornaments off the trees to purchase. We found a great slim Christmas tree from our local At Home. It measures only 18” in diameter but can still can hold quite a few ornaments. We re-stock throughout the show to keep the tree looking full. NEXT UP, WE HAVE BOOTH SIGNAGE/DÉCOR. 6. Emphasize your business name for potential buyers with branded signage. We have our friends over at Ella Jude to thank for this easy DIY pop-out booth sign idea. For this sign, we painted a thin piece of wood white, then transferred our logo (with our image transfer process) to both sides, though we've seen others hand paint their logo. We bought two pieces of copper pipe and an elbow joint and glued them all together to form an L-shaped corner. To hang the wood sign from the copper pipe, we spray-painted loose-leaf rings to match the copper pipe. We then use clear zip ties to attach the sign to our booth or tent. We're hoping to make an even larger version this year. For additional branded signage, we bought a large white vinyl banner with grommets and designed it to include our logo, website and social media handles. We use this when we have space available. For our outdoor art shows, such as Cooper Young, we hang the banner on the back of our tent so buyers walking down the sidewalks behind the booths can see our name. 7. Tell your story with signage. We sell handmade image transfers on wood and marble tile. The most common question we receive from customers during festivals and shows is,
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Saturday was the perfect day for a festival! It was sunny and warm, but not hot, and there was a light breeze blowing every now and then. My booth layout was a little different than I had planned. I didn't get to use my full 10 x 10 space so I didn't use all the props I normally use and I had to leave out 1 of my tables. I also had to make other adjustments and put my shutter easels closer together to make room for customers to cut across a corner of my space to go into the shop door beside my booth. Hopefully next year it'll be different because I sure could have used that 3rd table that I usually have set up. I covered my two tables with cheap canvas drop cloths from Big Lots. They were perfect for an art booth! Since I wasn't using Honeysuckle Lane as my business name, I didn't have a banner so I improvised and used clothes pins to clip my used, disposable art palettes to the front of the table. What do you think? People walking by commented on it and said it was a fun way to decorate an art booth. And if you remember, I had to change what I was making for the festival. Because of arthritis pain in my fingers, I couldn't embroider so I painted instead. I didn't have any prop displays for art and I put the word out that I was looking for old used shutters. I had plantation shutters in mind, but these board and batten shutters were offered to me and I used them to make my easels. We didn't see customers walking by with bags and bags of purchases... maybe they were enjoying the nice weather, food, music, and walking their dogs? However I did have sales and customers bought original art, prints, pillows (some I had made in the past and that had been in the shop behind my booth), and flower pins! Now that the Lavender Festival is over and I am going to take the summer off, I am listing remaining items in my Etsy shop. For now, I have listed silk ribbon pillows and a few original paintings, but check back through the month of June for the rest of the original artworks and prints to be listed. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Let's back-track a little now and I'll show you how I made the shutter easels. They cost me just over $2 each... can you believe that??? My sister's former boss had the shutters and I was going to buy them from him, but he surprised us and brought them to her and said to give them to me... free of charge! I thought that was really sweet of him. :) So, shutters: FREE. I needed paint... and I already had some on hand from a previous project so I considered that FREE as well. I needed slats to nail on the shutters to stand the artwork on and I found them in my husband's scrap pile... FREE. The only cost I had was hinge sets and I got them at Walmart for $1.97 plus tax per set. I made 5 shutter easels so I guess you could say it cost me $10 plus tax which I thought was pretty good! Here are the (somewhat) step by step pics: 1: shutters in original state 2: cutting slats with the bandsaw (one of the few power saws I'm not chicken to use) 3: nail slats on shutters (forgot to take a photo) 4: paint shutters while being thankful that I can use my husband's workshop for this :) 5: screw hinges on shutters --- why measure when you can eyeball it? ;) 6: finished shutters I made these on Thursday and had to go set up on Friday. I only did one coat of paint because it was so humid and I was afraid a second coat wouldn't dry in time. I am quite pleased with how they turned out. They weren't perfect, but they had a cottage look to them that I liked! Thanks for stopping by... I'll share some paintings later this week. Take care & God bless, Lana
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