Tips for designing an eye-catching craft fair booth
April 11th, 2013
This was KB and Friends’ first craft fair booth, and we had a big learning curve ahead of us when we created this display. Here are some of the things we learned from the Internet, from other crafters and from our own experience. Follow our tips for creating a craft booth that will be a real customer magnet.
The Mural
We were really thrilled with our display, which featured one wall filled with a painted mural of a street scene. First, we designed the mural on a computer. It was important to us that the mural filled one entire “wall” of the canopy. Following the computer printout, we sketched the mural on the canvas as it was spread out over the dining room floor.
We painted the mural on a painter’s canvas drop cloth, which we had cut down to size to fit our canopy wall. The drop cloth cost a lot less than if we had bought the canvas at a fabric store. For most of the colors, we used little $3 sample jars of Glidden indoor flat paint from Walmart. The heavy canvas drop cloth really soaked up the paint, so we had to really load up our paintbrushes to get full coverage.
The shop name in the window was the perfect opportunity for us to add our company name. If you’re going to spend the time to create a mural for your craft booth, make sure that you add your company name prominently. This is just your first step toward branding your product.
To paint the shop name, we cut out the letters on our Cricut machine. Then we used the reverse part as a stencil and a black paint pen to get crisp, clean lettering.
To hang the mural, we used industrial-strength Velcro. We hung the white, canopy wall behind the mural to keep the wind from causing the mural to billow.
The Bistro Table and Awning
While the canvas mural is a whimsical focal point for our booth, the awning and the bistro table help to give the scene a three-dimensional feel. The bistro table was where we sat to handle transactions.
The awning had no real purpose, other than to add dimension to the scene and to match our colorful, scalloped bunting that criss-crossed our booth.
The Display Grid
It took us quite a while to figure out how we were going to hang our scrapbooks and the matching embellishments. We found a 3-foot tall black plastic grid at Home Depot. We hung the black grid on two sides of our booth, attaching the grid with zip ties. Then we used small clothespins (regular-sized clothespins were too big) to hang our products.
The great thing about the grid is that it allowed our products to hang at eye level. That way, customers weren’t forced to bend over to see our fun, vintage-style scrapbooks.
Each of our scrapbooks and embellishment packs, of course, were labeled with the KB and Friends’ brand and a price tag. But in addition to that, we hung chalkboard-style signs on the grid, next to the products. The signs were made on the computer to mimic hand-drawn chalkboard signs.
About half of the signs had our KB and Friends’ brand on them, along with pricing.
The rest of our signs had clever little sayings on them. One sign that got a lot of chuckles said, ” Attention Shoppers: Your husband called. He said, “Buy as many scrapbooks as you want.”
The front table
The front table to our booth is at the entrance to our booth, so we wanted to make sure it was inviting. When you use a regular, folding table, it is fine for sitting but too short for a craft booth. You don’t want your potential customers having to lean over to see your product. You need to have the product at eye level so it will catch the attention of shoppers who are passing by.
We used plastic irrigation pipes to raise the height of our table by about six or seven inches.
We added the cute ruffled table cloth that we made to match the bunting and awning scallops. By the way, it’s important to note that the top of the table cloth was white, so that our sample scrapbooks would stand out against the white tablecloth top.
Instead of lying our sample books down flat, we put them on easels so they’d stand up to catch the attention of potential customers.
The table also our chalkboard signs, along with a black wire “chair” that was actually planter. The “chair” held a black wire basket of some of our least expensive scrapbook embellishments. And we also had a galvanized bucket holding flowers that displayed our clever little flowered clothespin clips. These were among our least expensive items, so we want to use them to lure in customers.
Our business cards were right out front in a red tin that had a chalkboard sign attached to the front.
Signage
Signage is one of the most important parts of your craft booth. Since the name KB and Friends probably would not be known by most craft fair goers, we decided to make the large sign across the top of our booth say, “Scrapbooks,” in big bold letters. That way, someone farther away could immediately see what we sell and might be drawn to the booth.
But once the craft fair goers got closer, they’d see our brand name not only painted on the mural, but hanging from a little wooden yellow sign above our front table. We bought that cute sign for only a few bucks at Michaels. It was raw wood, so we painted it yellow then added our scrapbook papers to jazz up the wooden flowers. We added our KB and Friends name across the top using Mod Podge.
The bottom part of the sign included credit card logos to let our customers know immediately that we accept credit cards. No need to say, “Credit Cards Accepted.” Just the logos are enough. We also included smaller versions of the logos on our sign on our bistro table and on a sign hanging on the grid.
Good luck with your craft booth endeavors! We hope this blog post helped inspire you.
