Are you a craft person looking to sell your magical goods at a craft fair or convention? We are going to walk you through our tips on how to attract potential customers and how to stand out in a competitive market!
If you’d rather watch a video on this information, consider checking out our YouTube video below!
1. Sell at Niche Markets
Our first tip is try to go to a focused convention in your niche. We sell D&D dice and other fantasy accessories and had a lot more luck at a convention that was catered specifically towards D&D or nerdy sort of crafts than we did at the general outdoor crafts market. Our first time selling was at a fan convention that was specifically fantasy and D&D stuff so we did really well there because everybody was there for our stuff. At the outdoor market we didn’t stand out as well there or we didn’t have as curated of a crowd as we would at a nerd convention. There’s two main hurdles with selling: it’s convincing the person that your thing is valuable to them and then convincing the person that your thing is more valuable than the guy next to you and so when you’re at a focused niche convention that first part is already done. Everybody’s interested in your type of stuff you just have to bring it down that that last stretch.
2. Prepare your space to stand out
Leading up to your fair you will be able to find out exactly how much space you have for your table or display. Plan to use all of that all of that marketing area. We had a 6×6 area so we got a table that was 6t wide to use all of that width to have as much on display as possible. If you have a much larger space and it’s an outdoor market you can create a big tented customer area where they can walk into your space, be surrounded by display and do their shopping in that. However if it’s a smaller space make sure your table consumes the entire width of that space so that when they approach your tent they have as much exposed to them as possible. You also you want to make sure that customers can easily see all of your goods while also making it look pretty aesthetic. For our earrings we have vertical displays so customers can look at many at once, for dice we have a flat cube system which shows all the dice at once in an organized fashion. We also sell coasters/dice rollers and we prop those up on little stands as well so people can see the whole design without having to bend over our table. We’re also looking to get a better display for our stickers, currently we just kind of spread them out but we’ve seen people use acrylic nail polish holders and then you put the stickers in those and it’ll prop them up in a very easy to view way.
If you are on a darker day or if you have a really large tent space make sure you bring lighting because everything looks better if it’s well lit. Our stuff is especially colorful and there’s sparkles that dance off the light so we had packed a little brick light that we use for filming in case it was not showing well enough with the lighting in the area. This helps our things pop out compared to a more gloomy background. We also brought some aesthetic decor just to attract people to our table. We use a black table cloth so that we all of our colorful items stand out with high contrast to the table.
Booths that look really plain are notably less busy. The next time you go to a convention just for fun look around if you see ones that look unexciting, typically there’s less people there and it makes a difference especially just turning that quick little glance into a “turn your shoulders”. We also used a little bit of tavern ambience music. We had a YouTube playlist downloaded on our phone playing it softly, not loud enough to bother your neighbors, not loud enough to hear it from booths down, it’s just for somebody who’s right in front of our booth and they can faintly hear this nice tavern music.
Another big thing especially if you’re selling outside is you need to be prepared for the weather. We were not sure if it was going to rain or not so we ordered a 6×6 tent on Amazon just in case it ended up raining. Of course it did and the tent was a necessity. Our neighbor at the market only brought a very small tent and after just an hour gave up and left. We would suggest getting a tent that is at least slightly larger than the table so we had a 6t long table we should have had like an 8×8 tent because any sort of wind was getting each end of the table a little bit wet in the rain. We just moved in our goods a little bit and then it was fine but a slightly larger tent if you can get away with it would be ideal. Make sure you get weights for the tent legs, at least 10 lbs per leg. You can get pre-made things that work perfectly fine just go for those if you can or get some cement blocks or bricks too as a cheaper option. Another nice thing to have is wind screens. We had just one on the back of our tent that we would have used to put our banner up there as well so it’s not just in front of our table. Having wind screens on the side would also be a big help to prevent that rain flying in on the sides.
3. Practice making a sale
The next tip is to make sure that you nail down the process of actually making a sale .You don’t really think about how much has to go into that to make it a smooth process. First of all make sure you have some method of collecting credit card payments. Most of the transactions are going to be credit card, rarely will you need cash. Credit card is the main way to go. Square is what we used, it’s free to set up, after like $1,000 in sales they’ll collect a few percent of each transaction, it’s no big deal. They send you their little credit card reader for free, which just plugs into your phone, and it just works. Some cards are too thick for it but you can manually plug in the number. Going along those lines you do also want to make sure you still have some cash on you. With our most recent outdoor convention it wasn’t so much of a big deal but when we went to the more curated nerdy convention there were quite a bit of younger people there and they had pretty much only cash on them.
For ringing up a sale, the things to make sure you can do is make sure you can quickly find the price of an item, find it in your credit card processing and inventory management system, then make the sale. Those first two parts are more complex than you think. We made a labeling system such that we could see the sticker we put on the item and find it in our inventory on Square in 5 seconds. You don’t want your customers sitting around while you take ages to look up a price.
4. Do whatever you can to get your customers to come back
Make business cards! Very often someone will be interested but not able to purchase at the moment. Give them a business card with your shop and socials on it so they can go home and make an order online! We also have on the back of our earrings a little stamp that works as a business card too. Some other options are you could have a scannable QR code on your table for them to check out your site right away.
One thing you can consider doing is collecting emails. Have a little sheet of lines that customers can put in their name name and email and you can then follow up in a few days to all those people saying thank you for checking out my stall, here’s a discount code to my online store. Just closing that loop can really convert people from just passing by to checking out your online store and falling in love with you.
5. Network with sellers
When we did our previous geek convention we were in the Chicago area. A really big Chicago convention is C2E2. A number of those other people at the convention with us have done C2E2 as sellers and so we were able to ask a lot about what that process is like, if it’s worth it, how much does the table cost, stuff like that. It is much easier to get a more intuitive feel for if the convention is a good fit for you and the seller community is in general super positive. Everyone’s trying to be helpful, at least in our experience we never had a negative conversation with another seller. If another seller is in your niche there are always was that you can collaborate with them too!
Thank you for reading!
Check out our shop!
Subscribe to the Everhearth Inn Quest Log Newsletter
Write your name on the list of adventurers the Innkeepers keep up to date on any available quests, as well as recipes, skillbooks, news, community events, and more! We know you have busy days adventuring, so we won’t waste any of your time with spam.
