Prep for the Holidays EP11: Market Booth Planning & Prep! Tips for Makers, Artists & Creatives

For Week 11 of the Prep for the Holidays minisode series, I'm focusing on market booths!

Now is the time to start planning this year's booth, buying or making any display items you might need, thinking through your signage, ordering business cards, deciding how to coax people to sign up for your email list so you can build a long term relationship with them and... figuring out strategies to encourage higher average order values!

A little advance planning and prep can make a huge difference come market day and help you build long term relationships with customers that last long after the market it over!

This episode is brought to you by our Premium Subscriber Community on Patreon and Buzzsprout

You can find Melissa at finelimedesigns.com, finelimeillustrations.com or on Instagram @finelimedesigns.

Chapters

• 0:00 Preparing for Market Booth Setup
• 11:12 Boosting Profit With Average Order Values

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome to task number 11 in our Prep for the Holidays mini-sode series. So this is an ongoing series we have been doing for 11 weeks now and that we're going to continue doing through the busy holiday selling season, and the idea behind it is to help you get ready for the busy holiday selling season. So the idea behind the podcast is that it was meant to be helpful to makers, artists, creatives, content creators and creative service providers and I have to be very honest, I think this week's episode is a little bit more geared towards the makers and crafters and artists, as opposed to the creative service providers and the digital content creators. Although, if you are a creative service provider and you are doing some markets this year we talked about that in an earlier episode, how that could be a great opportunity for some of you then, yes, you probably do want to listen to this episode because we're going to be talking about market booths. So now is the time of year where you want to start making sure that you have everything that you need for your market booth setup. So this is there's a lot of things you need to think about. If you're a market veteran, you probably already have your setup pretty ironed out. You're probably pretty used to it. But if you're thinking of adding something new or you've got some new products this year that you want to display, then now is the time where you need to start figuring out how you're going to display them and what you're going to be displaying them with.

Speaker 1: 1:29

But if you are new to markets or newer, then you need to first of all make sure you have a table, and a lot of the smaller markets, particularly with schools, they often provide a table, but if they don't, you're going to need to go out and get yourself a table. I just got a new one from Canadian Tire this week. It was $60 for a six foot table. Usually at school markets when they provide the table, it's eight feet, but I decided to get a six foot one for other markets, and if I decide at some point to do an outdoor market with a tent, then I would get another six foot and I'd be able to put them in a bit of an L shape and do some things with them. So, anyway, all that to say, if you're Canadian, canadian Tiger had a really good deal on for $60 for a six foot portable folding table.

Speaker 1: 2:16

So, yes, table is where it starts, but you're also going to need a tablecloth. Almost every market requires that you have a tablecloth, so make sure that you have a tablecloth. You're also going to need things like signage and a banner to say who you are. There's lots of different places where you can get these items. You probably have a local print shop that can help you with a banner. There's also places like Vistaprint that do banners for a really reasonable price and if you get a really good, solid vinyl banner, it can last you for a very long time. They usually come with grommets on the top so that you can hang them from things or safety pin them to things or hook them to things. So you want to make sure that you have good signage so that people know who you are when they're walking through the aisles of different markets or wandering through a market.

Speaker 1: 3:08

You also want to think about other things in terms of signage. So you want to think about the signage for your actual product. People really like to be able to know the price of things, particularly if it's busy and they maybe can't talk to you right away. It's really nice if they can see the price without having to ask. So you want to think about how you're going to do pricing, and it could be as simple as printing price labels off on your printer or creating a print price sheet and putting it in a picture frame or something so that it's easily visible, or creating hanging tags that go in different parts of your booth. There's lots of different ways you can do signage. You can use little cute little chalkboards or, like I said, little picture frames. There's a lot of different ways that you can make sure that your booth is fully signed.

Speaker 1: 3:56

I also like to have business cards, and I know there's a lot of you know back and forth about whether it's worth having business cards anymore. Honestly, for the amount they cost. You can get business cards done incredibly inexpensively from a local printer or from places where you order from, like Vistaprint or Jukeboxprint. You can get basic business cards very inexpensively 500 that last you for a very long time but they're a really great way for people who are just browsing to be able to pick up a card and tuck it in their pocket. You also never know who's attending a market. It could be somebody who has a shop or who is on the lookout for new products that they can sell in that shop. Or it might be a licensing agent who's out there looking for surface pattern designs you never know. So these people don't often announce themselves. They will just very quietly pick up a card and move along and check you out online later. So never hurts to have a business card. I also tuck them in to packages when I'm packing online orders. It's just a great way to kind of remind people where it came from, particularly with Etsy, because on Etsy you can't mention if you have your own shop or anything, but you can tuck a little card in that's got your actual website on and where people can find you, like your social media handles and things like that. So don't underestimate business cards. They are a great way to get found and you know what often happens is a couple months later somebody puts that jacket on, they reach into their pocket and they pull out that card and go oh yeah, she had really neat stuff. I'm going to go check her out online right now. I've done that so many times I can't even tell you. So I think business cards are worth the very minimal investment for that kind of marketing.

Speaker 1: 5:46

You also want to start looking for fixtures. What are you going to display your products on, and remember that at markets, height is key. So when people are walking the aisles, they can't they're not necessarily in a position where they can look down onto your table. So you need to make sure you get items up and visible to people who are walking by, preferably at a distance. So you want to think of ways that you can add tiers or layers or height to your table. This will also give you more selling space. So you might be looking for things like risers or lifters. So you might be looking for things like risers or lifters. You can get really creative.

Speaker 1: 6:22

A lot of crafters will make their own fixtures or, if they have a crafty partner or spouse who can help them out with that, thrift markets are a great place to go look for pieces. I have one that I'm in the process of refurbishing right now for my sticker display, but there's also actual shops where you can buy fixtures. So there's a few. There's like Eddie's Hangups, which is one that I've used a few times. There's a lot of stuff on Amazon. Most cities have large cities in Canada will have some kind of fixturing place where you can either go shop in person or you can order online. This is particularly important for things like greeting cards, which require a bit more of a custom, like a specific type of fixture, and I have often found that for things like that, amazon is usually the most expensive place to shop. So if you can find a fixturing store or look on Marketplace, I find card spinners on Marketplace for sale on Marketplace all the time Any of those types of things. Check those out and see what you can find booth um tips and display tips and I can't think of the exact name of it right now, but I will find it and I will put it in the show notes both on the podcast and on YouTube For those of you. Uh, because there's all kinds of if. If you sell it.

Speaker 1: 7:55

Somebody has asked about how to display it in that group. It's a really great resource and lots of pictures. It's very picture heavy so you can see what people have actually done, so it can give you a lot of great ideas. You also want to start setting up Once you've got your table set it up in your house and set it up with the tablecloth and start playing around and see what it looks like. You don't want to be setting up your display for the first time at your market that's not the time to work out the kinks, so you want to do that now. Your market that's not the time to work out the kinks, so you want to do that now. And you can see how full it is. You can see where your trouble areas are, where you might need to search out something in particular that could be to help with a particular display problem.

Speaker 1: 8:34

You also might want to add some props in, depending on what it is that you sell. If you're a creative services provider, then props are going to be really key for you, because you're going to be trying to tell your story without any product. So think of what you can do from a prop standpoint. If you're a photographer and you do a lot of studio shoots with families and things, you probably have a pretty good prop collection that you can borrow from and take in. But maybe you wanna get some frames or something that people can hold up and do fun poses, things like that. So think about that kind of thing If you.

Speaker 1: 9:10

I mentioned before in a previous episode how there had been a travel agent at one market that I did who specialized in custom Disney vacations and she had all kinds of Disney props and stuff, so made it really fun. She had a castle backdrop and that people could take pictures up against and just you know, fun stuff to try and draw people in. Because that's what you want to think about. You want to think about how you're going to draw people in, how you're going to get noticed. People shop with their eyes at markets and very often it can be crowded and they may not get a great sight line to you. So you want to make sure that you've got some way to kind of stand out.

Speaker 1: 9:50

There's also lots of things you can do at your booth to draw people to you. So you can have like a spin the wheel and you can get a spinning wheel on Amazon. That's just the right size for a craft market table. You can have people come do that. People always get excited when they see something going on at a booth and it kind of draws them in. Unfortunately, a lot of people are doing the spinning wheel now, so you'll see a lot of them at markets and it's kind of losing its novelty. But if you haven't seen it at markets that you do locally, then maybe give it a try because you might be the first person to do it where you are, but start to think about those ways that you can draw people to you.

Speaker 1: 10:28

And we're going to talk a little bit more about markets and selling a product in future episodes, but I wanted to do this one this week because now is the time. If you need to order fixturing or business cards or banners or any of that stuff, now is the time to do that, because if you leave it to the last minute and I made this mistake my first year doing markets I left my banner to the very last minute and I wound up paying a premium for it because I didn't plan ahead. So if you can get all of that stuff done now and be set up, then you're going to be much better prepared come market day. So that is it for this week for task number 11.

Speaker 1: 11:12

I'll be back next week with another new task for prep for the holidays, and next week we will also have a brand new episode for the new season of the podcast, where we're going to be talking about average order value, and if you are doing markets or if you sell online whether it's a physical product or a service or a digital product average order value is a great way If you can raise your average order value, you can raise the amount of profit that you're making, and it's quite easy to do it to do, and there are so many ways that you can do it. So we're going to be doing a deep dive into average order values and how you can utilize that, not just over the holidays but long-term. So it's a great uh business episode, um money-making episode next week. So tune in for that. And that is it for this week. We will see you all again next week. Thanks for tuning in.