Craft Fair Virgin

On Friday the 5th December I did my very first craft fair and all in all I think it went really well and I really enjoyed it…and I certainly learnt a few things too…

1. Don’t turn up late: I set off from home at 3.30pm which would give me plenty of time to get there for 5pm so that I would have an hour to set up before the fair opened at 6pm. I didn’t factor into the equation that I had to go and get diesel, that there would be roadworks and delays on the way and I also selected ‘shortest route’ rather than ‘fastest route’ on my sat nav which meant I was taken via Edinburgh during the early Friday rush hour traffic and got stuck at every set of traffic lights on the way…so after a vey stressful lengthy drive I didn’t get there until 5.50pm. So I had 10 minutes to get everything out of the car and carry it to my table upstairs – I think I got the worst positioning because I was so late. All the stalls were downstairs apart from mine and another stall holder and we felt a little left out as we heard the buzz of people chatting below. Ho hum…
2. Don’t pack all your items, especially earrings, into tiny ziplock bags that are impossible to open in a hurry: I thought I would be uber organised and pack up all my items up individually so it would be easy to see what was what and get everything out and set up the stall in an organised fashion. As I only had about 10 minutes it was incredibly frustrating trying to get all my earrings out of these tiny bags in a hurry and I ended up having a mess everywhere and being totally disorganised because of it. It would have been far better to just bung all the earrings in one bag, bracelets in another and just tip one bag out at a time and set those items up before moving on to the next.
3. Attach price labels to each items before you go: As I had so little time to set up and I hadn’t priced my items beforehand, I had to quickly price things up as I went along which meant it took longer to set up, and I was getting in the way of customers at the beginning of the fair and having to apologise to them. It also meant that I left a lot of items unpriced and I think that put a lot of customers off as I’m told by people who do craft fairs all the time that customers prefer it if they don’t have to ask how much something is.

But nevermind – it was a great experience and I really enjoyed it. I got loads of positive comments and had some great conversations and pursuaded a lot of people to take a card and check out my website. I’ve looked at my website and blog stats today and they’ve had quite a few hits this w/e, so I’m hoping it’s people from the craft fair. I also managed to tell most folk about next weeks Craft Fair, but I wish I’d put a sign up about that somewhere.

I’m hoping to do better next week as all the stalls are on one level, so I’ll be amongst the buzz. I’m also going to go through my stock and offer more items at the lower price range as that’s what sold well on Friday – I think that’s the credit crunch effect – no-one wants to spend more that a fiver. So as I’m more aware now of what people are likely to buy, I can tailor make the stall to cater for this aspect and hopefully sell more this way…fingers crossed.

Here’s a few pictures of my stall: