by Over the years, we have attended close to a hundred craft fairs. Some were well attended, and some were a bit disappointing. Some were well organized, and some were less so. A few have been outright disasters.
In general, the better organized an event is, the better attended it will be. There are no guarantees, but it’s still a good chance that the attendance will correlate with the quality of the organization.
Here are some of the things we’ve observed about what makes a craft fair more successful…
Advertise the Event Well in Advance
No one is going to attend an event they don’t know is happening. And unless they are the sort of people who visit craft fairs the way my grandmother used to go tag-sale-hopping, they might have already made plans to shop elsewhere, simply because they heard about the other one first.
As a craft vendor, I tend to book events almost half a year in advance. This year was unique, in that I had planned to take the year off from vending, so I didn’t already have events scheduled when I was invited to attend a couple of events less than a month away. If I had been on a regular schedule, there’s probably no way I would have had the dates open. One of my favorite venues begins planning their next annual event the day of this year’s. It’s always a pleasure to attend, and it’s always one of the best attended we do.
Social Media is Your Friend
If you don’t have a presence on Facebook, you need to establish one. The very minute you have a date set for your next event, Create an Event on Facebook. Let vendors know there’s an Event of Facebook, so that they can share it. Let them post photos of their work on the Event Page. Encourage them to do so. Encourage members of your organization, church, school, etc., to share the links on their pages. Facebook will remind people of events they’ve Liked, and they’ll also let people who live in the area know there’s an event coming up. It costs nothing, and it just might increase traffic.
Signage is as Important as Location
Knowing when an event will happen is not nearly as important as where. We were recently set up at an elementary school that was on a side road off of a side road off of a main road. The only sign we saw for the event was in front of the entrance to the school.
It wasn’t surprising, then, that the only shoppers we had were people who already knew us, other vendors, and members of the PTO. There were a few of the aforementioned craft-fair-hoppers, who I absolutely love seeing at every event.
In contrast, on the way home, we saw several signs, on main roads, for a few other events that happened to coincide with ours. It’s a fair bet that they saw more shoppers than we did.
Give Vendors Adequate Set-Up / Break-Down Time.
Some vendors need at least an hour to set up their booths. Give vendors two hours, and they’ll have time to walk around and see who else is vending before the public arrives and they are tied to their booth. It’s stressful to still be setting up when shoppers arrive, and it makes us appear unprofessional.
On the same note, make sure event volunteers show up before vendors are scheduled to. We once attended an event that instructed vendors to begin setting up at 7:00 AM, and the people who were supposed to show us where our spaces were didn’t start arriving until around 7:15 AM. Chaos ensued. We never attended that particular event again.
Music on PA Speakers is Obnoxious
At our last event, the organizers thought it would be nice to have holiday music playing over the state-of-the-art-in-1965 PA system. This created several issues.
First, the speakers had no local volume controls, so it made it hard to hear shoppers’ questions.
Second, PA speakers are not optimized for playing music. Most PA systems I’ve heard are barely adequate for making announcements.
Finally, and most importantly, they apparently had only one compilation disk of Greatest Christmas Hits, which had a running time of approximately 35 minutes. The Craft fair was Five Hours Long. We heard “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” at least six times. This sort of psychological torture violates the Geneva Convention, I’m sure.
Treat your vendors well and they’ll keep coming back. They’ll share their customer base with your organization. They’ll share your events with their customer base. Everybody wins.
