Craft Show Booth Success Tips

Your craft show booth is your traveling showcase for your candles and any other products you sell, such as bath and body products or gift baskets. As such, your craft show display deserves some thought and preparation. The look and presentation of your products can go a long way toward helping you have a successful show.

Ideas for Your Craft Show Booth

At a busy craft show with lots of vendors and booths, you may literally have only a few seconds to capture people's attention and make a good first impression as they walk by. So as you work on your display setup, keep in mind the ideas and techniques below for a great-performing craft show display.

1. Arranging Your Tables and Booth

This aspect of your craft show booth display is very important to your customers. They want to be able to move easily in and around your display, so your prime motivation here should be to arrange your tables and any shelving you might have in such a way that it welcomes your customers into your "store" and makes it easy for them to see all of your wares.

The most common arrangement of tables for this would be in a "U" shape or "L" shape. But this is also determined by the size of your space - don't place your tables in a "U" if your booth space is narrow. Your customers will end up feeling trapped and may not even come into your booth. Most events offer a space of 8x10 or 10x10, so it's a good idea to have one or two table arrangements that will fit no matter what your space.

Once you've gotten your table arrangement organized, plan on covering the tables with material. This should reach the floor for the best look - and an added advantage is that it allows you to store your boxes and bins underneath the table but still out of sight. I usually recommend a solid color cloth, as patterns tend to overpower your products.

Your candles are likely all different colors, which makes a lovely, colorful display in your craft show booth. Since you want to showcase your candles, choose a cloth in a neutral color to really show them off. I personally tend to love dark earth tones like green or brown, so to use the colors I love and still show off my candles, I cover my dark green material with a cream-colored lace coverlet. This may be an option for you if you love dark colors like I do!

For my large 16 oz. jar candles, I use 3 step cardboard risers that I set right on top of my tables. I cover them with fabric and the candles look great on the dark material. Other ways to achieve height are to use standard shelving units set on the floor (just make sure they're easily portable), or even to use your packing boxes set upside down on your tables. When covered with your fabric, they make great risers.

Try to use your imagination to find ways to display your products. I place my gourmet soaps in baskets - with their colorful wrappers they look really pretty. Serving trays, small tabletop shelves, or pretty boxes all make unconventional, eye-catching ways to arrange your products in your craft show booth.

Don't feel that it's necessary to put all of your inventory out at once. Your table should look full, but not too full. Your customers need to be able to see your great candles, and to be able to choose ones to look at and smell. I like to place a small vase of flowers on the table, or an artificial vine draped tastefully around the different containers. Those little touches go a long way toward showing your pride in what you have to offer and make your craft show booth look that much more professional.

3. Signage and Pricing

It's imperative that all of your candles, gift baskets and accessories have the price on them. Most likely customers won't bother to ask the price if it's not readily apparent to them - they'll just move on to the next booth. So make sure that people can easily and quickly see how much an item costs.

It is difficult sometimes to put an actual price tag or sticker on some particular items. So in these cases, you'll need to have some kind of signage. For example, instead of placing an individual price sticker on each bar of my soap, I placed them all in a pretty basket and placed a sign right next to the basket. I made the sign on my computer, and then printed it on the bottom half of a sheet of heavy card stock. Then I simply folded the card stock to make a tent.

Other types of signage can be printed up on your computer and then placed in clear sign holders that you can purchase at any office supply store. These come in all different sizes and orientations, so you can place them all over your craft show booth in whatever arrangement you'd like.

One thing is ultra important ... NO HANDWRITTEN SIGNS! Sorry for shouting, but I wanted to make sure you heard me. Nothing is more of a turn off than approaching a booth with eye-catching crafts, and then seeing sloppy hand-written signs. If you want to be thought of as a business professional, you have to act like one. Take the time to do your signs the right way - your business image (and profits!) will definitely benefit.

If you take the time to practice your craft show booth setup ahead of time, and really organize yourself, selling your candles this way can be fun and very profitable at the same time. The key, as with all other aspects of your candle business, is preparation and planning.

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