CVU High School Craft Fair: My Booth

Now that the craft fair was done, I'd already posted about how the show was run. The next part is: how my new booth fared. Overall, the booth turned out much better than I'd hoped. For sales, I had sold 14 prints (11 x 14 matted) and one small original painting (http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=481921001678&set=a.455237576678.239356.139120096678 ) . This was better than expected since I had never done this craft show and I had no idea what to expect.

Setup: The setup of the booth took a lot longer than expected. I should have figured on that. My old booth of four panels and two lights took around 40 minutes to setup and hang the paintings. The new booth of nine panels and eight lights took around 1-1/2 hours. In addition, the setup took almost the entire back section of my truck. This left very little room for my paintings/prints. I'm going to have to figure out a way of transporting more stuff (for outdoor shows, I need to be able to transport a tent/weights and for bigger shows, I need more inventory/paintings).

Lights: The new lights from Ikea worked out great. Easy to setup and the lamp hoods did not get extremely hot. For $8.95 a piece, they were a great deal. I may consider switching from the 40 watt bulbs to the 60 watts to see if there was an appreciable difference in lighting. The gym had considerable lighting, so I couldn't tell how much of an effect the lamps had on the painting.

People's reactions: This was awesome. Almost consistently, people would walk by fairly briskly, say "Wow" and slow down their walk, as they went by the booth. So, it got people's attention without being gawdy. In most cases, simply saying "Hi" brought people into the booth for closer looks at the paintings. So, the reaction was quite favorable.

Overall, I think that the new booth design works great. I'm going to have to figure out how to speed up the sales of the products and replacing of prints when they are purchased. The slowest part was the negotiation of the sales/receipts/bagging/print replacing. At times, it was a bit crowded with eight to ten people in the booth and trying to do the sale.