Selling Your Puppets and Other Crafts
There are many ways to sell the products that you create. Many puppet builders rely on craft shows so I’ll cover this method of selling, and remember that most of the techniques mentioned below can also be applied towards your business if you own a store.
When selling at craft shows, you have to cover a lot of issues that could cause major headaches if not properly handled before hand.
If you’re managing your booth alone you must consider how best to handle several tasks at once.
You may have a customer wanting to pay for your item, with a group of teenagers standing to the side trying to pick up one of your items freely and a mother on the other side with a child who has melted ice cream all over her wee little fingers.
The mother, of course, is too busy looking at your items to notice that her child is covering your Antron fleece covered, a full-body puppet with eye mechanisms with chocolate.
What do you do? Do you panic, freak out and get ill at those visiting your booth? No, that’s not a wise thing to do because it’ll kill sales. What you do is prepare ahead of time so that you don’t encounter such nonsense.
First you set your booth in such a way as to protect your smaller items for those times you have to focus on paying customers, so that you can safely turn your back for a few moments and know that nothing will be damaged or stolen.
Put your smaller items in the back of your booth, and always keep your money with you in an apron pocket. Have your larger items on the ends of your booth and outside of your booth, because it’s much harder for people to walk off with your larger items than it is for them to the smaller ones that slip into pockets easily, like little finger puppets or accessories.
Puppets can be stained by little hands, remember that children attend shows and that sometimes their parents aren’t as attentive as they should be when they are browsing your booth.
Have some inexpensive puppets that children can play with.
Make sure that your booth is also decorated attractively. A boring or depressing booth doesn’t help your sales much. Make sure you tables are covered in attractive coverings that are colorful, and that you make your booth look as much like a comfortable home as you possibly can.
The more comfortable you make your booth for your customers, the longer they will linger and the greater your chances are of making a sale.
Put labels on your puppets so people know who made it and where to buy another.
To make these labels, you would print your business information on special paper made for iron on transfers. This paper can be obtained at any office supply store.
Next iron your information onto cloth ribbon. By using cloth ribbon instead of paper, your labels will last much longer and the chances of them being removed are much less than if you used regular paper labels.
Another thing you can do to help increase your sales, would be to do something creative with your booth that would draw more customers to it.
A video running on a televison showing some of the methods you use to build a quality puppet can help increase value. When they see the time and care used to make a strong mouth plate or to attach the arms can set your puppets apart frommass-produced models. An instructional video playing, showing people having fun learning to puppeteer can help motivate potential buyers.
I encountered a gentleman one year that was selling little puppets in his booth, but instead of just sitting his puppets on a shelf he instead made his booth look like a playhouse and he gave little puppet shows to draw customers.
He even went so far as to teach the children how to use the puppets in a variety of different ways. The children loved this guy and his puppets so much that he really made a killing.
When you provide demonstrations for your customers, and get more involved with showing them how useful your products are then you’ll definitely see an increase in your sales.
If you just sit in a chair all day with your products on a shelf, then you’re not giving visitors much of a reason to stop by your booth. I see many crafters just sitting in their booths with this dull, bored look on their faces and this is truly something sad to see.
If you’re not excited about your products, how in the world can you dare expect anyone else to get excited about them?
Get off your butt and show some enthusiasm about your merchandise and you’ll certainly see an increase in your sales. On the other hand if you’re already showing enthusiasm then forge that statement, but I have found that it’s rare to see a crafter who really seems to enjoy selling their products.
If you own a store, you can also do demonstrations in it. Just because you have a storefront doesn’t mean you shouldn’t educate your shoppers a bit about how wonderful your fine products are.
Now I’d like to share with you one more tactic before I conclude this chapter. There is one thing that most crafters overlook, that could increase their profits 300% if they just applied this tactic.
So many crafters make it a habit of arriving to set up their booths early, then sitting there a whole weekend selling before they pack up and leave.
I have never seen another crafter promote their booth BEFORE the show, and although I certainly hope I’m not the only person that does this, it is a pretty sad thing for most crafters to overlook.
I guess most crafters expect people to just show up, and I know at most shows that plenty of people do arrive, but by time they get to your booth they could very well be broke.
So how can you ensure that they look for you before they look for any other booth?
A simple solution would be to distribute flyers. Create a simple one page flyer that you can hand out to people in the area BEFORE the show starts. Make sure that your flyer includes adequate details about your items, and stresses the benefits of your items.
You’re selling your products and you want others to know how wonderful your products are. Let them know that you’ll be at the show, before the show even starts, without relying on the fact that they may eventually find your booth.
You want them at your booth early when they are still excited and still have money to spend. Not at the end of the day when they are tired, hungry, ill, broke and ready to go home.
Make sure that you include accurate details about your booth as well, so that they can find your booth easily. You’ll definitely see an increase in sales if you practice this one small technique alone.
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