Craft Fair Prep: Find your Sale!

Here's round two of our Craft Fair Prep mini-series. After deciding what to sell, you need to

Find Your Sale

1. Pick a Fair You're Familiar With: To start out, we pick fairs we had been to and enjoyed. Knowing the type of vendors, size of the crowd(roughly), size of the venue, etc. can give you an idea of what you're getting yourself into.

2. Determine How Many Fairs to Do: Think ahead of time of how many you want to do. Sure it would be great to do 6 or 7 fairs...but not too realistic. You have to think about the time frame, taking into consideration how much inventory you may have to re-supply in a week.  Cost is also a factor in determining how many you want to do.

3. How Much Money Do You Have to Start Up? Craft fairs are not cheap. Most worth registering for...at least here in AK...are $85 and up. On top of your costs for your craft...consider how much you would be able to recover at a fair, and then that can help determine which fairs to register for. Also, keep in mind that you may find a fair that is pretty cheap, may not have very many people coming to it...so you won't sell much.

4. Plan Ahead: The fall fairs up here begin registration in June or July. August for sure. That means the really popular fairs fill up fast. Some require you to jury and those are usually 2-3 months before the fair. Also, if you're going to do a fair...you should be working on your inventory...or you may not have enough stuff, or you'll be pulling some all nighters!

5. Jury or Not: Some fairs require the vendors to go before a jury or send in items and /or pictures of the items to be judged 2-3 months in advance (hence planning ahead). We've only done one fair that required us to do this. Man were we nervous. We had  images of going into a room with 15 people sitting behind a table, with us having to do a presentation...yah not so much. We went in and sat a table with one person from the committee, who looked at our stuff, asked questions, took a few pictures and sent us on our way. We were notified a few days later. This year we were invited without having to jury. The point of this story is that you may have to jury to get into the fair you want to. Each fair has different rules...but juries aren't scary:)
6. Electrifying: On all the applications we've ever filled out...they ask if you need electricity. It usually cost 10-15 dollars extra for a booth with electricity. Also, those booths are in short supply so if you need electricity...sign up early!

Hope this is helping, now go find your fair:)

Sarah