Fall 2017 Craft Fair Experience

Craft fair season is in full force, so I thought I would talk a little bit about my craft fair experience. I know there are lots of crafters out there that are always looking for different tips and tricks to make their craft fair experience better. Heck, I’m always on Pinterest looking up different ideas and try to replicate them whenever possible. I hope you enjoy my craft fair experience and hope you learn something new.

I attended two craft fairs this year. The first one I went to at the end of September. This is the one I usually attend every spring and fall. It’s definitely been my favorite. I enjoy going to this location because it’s in a library, which means a lot of different people show up, especially families. I also feel like this library does an amazing job with advertising this craft fair so lots of people show up. Within the last year, it’s gotten a lot more buzz, which means they have to make room for more vendors. Somehow they make it all work and fit in as many tables as they can. However, to play it safe, as soon as I get the email reminder of their next craft fair, I make sure to fill out my application right away.

With this craft fair, I pretty much had a lot of the same items from the previous craft fair. I always like to have dishcloths on hand as those are a crowd favorite. I brought a few blankets, even though people don’t seem to gravitate towards those. You never know, though! I also brought a lot of hats. With the upcoming cooler days and winter, I thought hats would go over well. I made a few more emoji hats both in child and adult sizes. People seemed to get a kick out of these emoji hats.

I also had some of my coffee cup key chains sell. I brought along some of my recent Halloween makes just to see if they would sell, too. My Halloween Boo Banner sold as well as one of my trick-or-treat bags. Overall, I felt like this was a good craft fair and I was able to not only make my table money back, but also enough to make a decent profit. I was also able to get a few custom orders, which I always enjoy.

Here is a photo of my husband and I:

For the second craft fair, I was at a new location I’ve never been to before. I figured it would be nice to try and branch out and see what other craft fairs are happening in my area. This craft fair was at a parks and recreation center. What I liked about this one is that they had high school student volunteers helping to unload your car and direct you to where your table is located. This helped save a lot of time as we were able to borrow a cart and load everything up in one trip.

This was by far the biggest craft show event I’ve ever been to! There were 8 different rooms filled with vendors, so there were plenty of options to choose from. When looking around, I noticed there were a lot of jewelry and wreath makers. There were also other crochet sellers as well. There was one booth I noticed that was selling crochet blankets that looked like the person picked them up from the thrift store and was trying to pass it off like they made it. The blankets were super old and dirty looking and had the telltale thrift store tags on them. This person was selling these blankets for $2, which people seemed to gobble up because of the low price. Needless to say, my higher quality blankets weren’t moving.

I was able to sell some of my emoji hats as well as some dishcloths. For the most part, I felt like people either passed up my table altogether or scoffed at the prices. I guess they were looking for a bargain. While I did make some sales and made my table money back, I didn’t make as much of a profit as I would have liked considering it was a 5 hour craft fair.

The overall vibe I felt was people looking to purchase items at a very cheap price instead of the quality of the items. Plus, I felt like because this was such a large show, it’s hard for people to choose your items when there are at least 10 different vendors of the same type of craft trying to sell things as well. I’m glad I experienced this craft show, but I don’t think I’ll be returning in the future.

So what did I learn? I learned that it’s best to stick to the smaller craft shows as I have a better chance of selling my crochet items rather than at a large craft show. I still have a lot to learn when it comes to my table set-up. One vendor suggested having my items at different levels to showcase them better as people are lazy and don’t want to look down, but rather have things at eye level. I’ll have to work on this and search around on Pinterest to get some different ideas. Finally, if people are lingering at your table, let them know that if they don’t see anything they like, they can always request a custom order in a different size or color. That’s what helped me get custom orders at the first craft fair I went to.

I hope my craft fair experience helped you a little and you were able to see all that goes into a craft fair. If you’re attending a craft fair within the next couple of months, I wish you the best of luck! Tell me about your craft fair experience by leaving me a comment. I’d love to hear from you! Have any tips or tricks? Leave a comment below and share with others!

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