Working My First Craft Booth

FogFest 2012 was an amazing experience. It was the first time I've run my own craft booth (in collaboration with my good friend Dana of course) and we rocked it! All of our research and planning really paid off. 

1. We started by finding a small festival that had the right audience for our products. We decided on FogFest because it was family friendly and it was close by our homes. We applied and waited to be accepted.
2. Once we were accepted, we went online and read through the multitude of websites that give advice on how to do a craft fair booth. (I'll list my favorites in another post.)
3. Then we browsed tons of photos and did some hands-on craft fair snooping (see earlier posts in this blog) to find out how we might want to set up our booth.
4. At the same time we looked at the layout of other booths, we also looked at how much product other booths featured. That was really helpful in figuring out how much inventory we needed to create.
5. In Google documents, we created and shared lists of things we thought we needed, that way we could each comment and keep track of what we were each thinking.
6. Dana and I met up at least once every other week in the months before the festival, if only to check in and see how we were each doing on inventory creation. 
7. Three weeks before the festival we got together at Dana's house and setup a mock booth. We didn't have all the pieces, but this mock setup helped us figure out what we still needed.
8. A week before the show we did another mock setup in Dana's backyard to fine tune the missing pieces. We made a master list of everything we would need to bring to the festival with us.
9. The night before the festival we gathered everything at Dana's house and checked everything off our master list and packed it in Dana's mini van. 
10. The first day of the fest we showed up at our booth location a couple hours before the festival opened. Our tent was already set up by the festival people (we paid extra for that). 
11. Setup for the booth went smoothly because we were already so organized. 
12. And thanks to Dana's husband and my fiance, we were set to go long before the first people walked through the gates.

We had so much fun and learned so many lessons, which I will list out in the next post :)