After having slaved away devising, planning, creating and developing your homemade products, be those food items, home-brewed beer or wine or crafty creations, it is now time to start selling them to the general public.
Aside from the tried-and-tested selling medium of social media platforms and other online outlets, one of the most exciting and thrilling ways to promote your products and make some money too is to attend a related trade show or festival as a stallholder.
Here, for your information and reading pleasure, is a guide to selling your homemade products at tradeshows and festivals.
1. Color Is Key
Regardless of the different and contrasting tones, styles and colors of the products you have created, the importance of presenting an aesthetically pleasing and eye-catching stall front cannot be exaggerated.
Choose a bright color for the gazebo element of your stall and cover any available benches or tables within your stall with the same bright colors. To increase brand awareness and to simultaneously create a uniform aesthetic, include the same colors on any business cards or promotional material.
2. Promotional Material!
There is a wide plethora of relatively affordable, unique and equally as effective ways to increase brand awareness through the use of promotional material and freebies.
Novelty items are by far the best and most entertaining promotional item that will guarantee to cement your stall, and thus your brand, in the minds of paying customers and potential buyers alike. A fantastic example of such a freebie is a custom magic 8 ball, that you can order in your new brand colors and choose the message inside to be entirely linked towards your homemade products.
3. Engage With Your Audience
If you are naturally an outgoing and effervescent personality, you are more than likely already exercising your natural people skills wherever you go to make people aware of your exciting new business venture.
However, if you are more of a shy and introverted person, it would be strongly advisable to either recruit a trusted friend or family member to work on the stall with you, or else work on your interactive and people skills prior to your first festival or trade show.
The idea here is to create an experience for each and every potential customer who stops at your stall and to do that you need to actively engage and communicate verbally with them.
4. Check The Internet Connection!
This may seem an irrelevant point to make and you may, wrongly, assume that if a venue is putting their own trade show or festival, they will ensure they are able to supply adequate WiFi connection so your PDQ and other payment systems will work.
Sadly, however, many venues consider this to be solely the stallholder’s responsibility over their own; therefore, either bring a booster pack or, even better, ensure your own mobile phone or tablet can be used as a wireless hotspot.