Getting your craft fair off the ground can sound intimidating, but, by breaking it into steps, you will find it’s very doable. We’ve split the instructions into steps, and offer links to helpful resources that will allow you to create your craft fair with ease. 

1. Decide On Your Location
2. Decide on a Date
3. Get your Neighborhood Involved In Planning
4. Invite Neighbors to be Vendors, Using a Form and Spreadsheet
5. Advertise Online
6. Be Strategic About Your Signage
7. Advertise Around the Community
8. What We Learned Over the Years

1. Decide on Your Location

We host our neighborhood craft fairs on our street. This makes it easy to pull in neighbors with driveways that have space to set up their booths, and who may even host outside vendors on their driveway. But, there are a multitude of other options for locations, and some of them might even be free. Perhaps your local community center has an all-purpose room you could reserve for your event. Or, consider a large parking lot at a place like your local church. All of the tips we give on this site can work for a multitude of locations, the most important thing is to advertise: first to get vendors, and second to attract buyers on the day of the fair.

2. Decide on a Date

It’s important to think about when you want to host your craft fair. We do it in October because the weather is still ideal since we’re outdoors, but people are also starting to think about the holiday season. However, you may consider a Spring or Summer sale. Just keep in mind what your goal is, and what kinds of things you hope to sell.

3. Get Your Neighbors Involved in Planning

Start this a month or two before the craft fair. We usually start in late August before our October craft fair.

It’s great if you already know your neighbors, and can start talking up the fair months in advance, to get them involved. These friendly neighbors are invaluable because they can be part of your team that helps organize and advertise. But, if you’re not familiar with a lot of your neighbors, that’s ok too…part of the beauty of the neighborhood craft fair is that you will get to know people along the way! And, each year it will get easier, because after participating once, your friends and neighbors will be excited to participate again. 

Ask your team what the best date is, that works for them. We chose the weekend before Halloween, because the weather was still fairly nice, but it was far enough into the year to feel like craft fair season.

The first year, we started with a flier that said, “Neighborhood Craft Fair, anyone?” and went door to door putting them in doors or under mats at every neighbor on our street. The flier included my phone number and email. This generated some interest, but I found that a personal invitation was best, so we started knocking on doors to talk to people about the fair, and if people didn’t answer, we left a second flier, this time with a QR code that led to a form to fill out about the crafts they planned to sell. (More about that in Step 3.)

After the first year, we asked a few of our close neighbors to be hosts, and we used part of the nominal fee we charged our vendors to give to the host homes as a thank you. The rest of that money went to our family team who handled all the advertising and signage.

My sister and I also have a few crafty friends so we invited them out on the day. That first year, we had about 12 total vendors and six houses. Around half the vendors were stationed on our driveway!

The next year, people kept signing up right up until the craft fair from outside the neighborhood so we assigned them to host driveways and said the more the merrier! We had about 22 vendors on 10 properties in 2022.

4. Invite Neighbors to be Vendors, Using a Form and Spreadsheet

We recommend a combination of knocking on doors, and leaving a handout behind. Your handout should include a basic description of your fair, an invitation to participate, a couple of options for dates, and a website URL or QR code that takes them to a form they can fill out in order to officially participate. 

Take advantage of our free flier to ask neighbors to participate

We’ve created a free flier template that you can customize and hand out to neighbors. It will walk you through the process of creating a QR code that people can scan in order to sign up to be a vendor. Here is the flier template.

We also offer a free form that potential vendors can fill out!

If you clicked on the flier above, you may have already been introduced to our free Participant form. But, if you don’t want to use that flier but still want to use our form, you are welcome to do so! Make a copy of our template HERE by clicking on “make a copy” for interested vendors to gather information about them for our craft fair.

If you are new to using Google forms, learn how to edit and manage a form HERE, as well as how to link it to a spreadsheet. All the information we gathered went directly into the linked spreadsheet, so we could keep track of our vendors. We were then able to use that spreadsheet to take note of who had paid and had not paid to participate. The spreadsheet also made it easy to add facebook posts on our event page, to tell visitors about the different vendors who would be selling their wares.

If you don’t decide to use our free flier OR our free form, that’s ok too, just make sure you collect the following information from potential vendors:

• Contact info (name, email, phone, address)
• Do you live on the street and would you mind being a host driveway?
• Give a description of your products for sale
• Upload images of your items.
• Are you able to donate $10 to help with advertising? (Outside vendors: $20)
• How did you hear about us?

5. Advertise online

Start advertising three weeks in advance.

Take advantage of as many free avenues as you can to drive attention to your neighborhood craft fair. 

• Set up a Facebook event page and posted spotlights of each vendor every couple of days leading up to the event.
• Create an attractive graphic that you can post to places like Facebook Marketplace and Nextdoor, and accompany it with text with more details, to let people know about the local craft fair in their area.
• See if there’s a free or low-cost option to post an upcoming event with your local paper. There may even be a low-cost option to have it printed! Start by looking for an events calendar, and look for a button to submit an event.
• Advertise for vendors. This can be a bigger money-maker for you the organizer, because each driveway (if the homeowner is willing) may fit 2-4 vendors, so pack them in if you can! Learn about inviting vendors from outside your neighborhood.

Looking for more hints about advertising online? Learn to advertise for your community craft fair online.

6. Be strategic about your signage

Set up large signs six days in advance and smaller signs the morning of the fair.

Set up the largest signs you can, at the major entrances to your fair. We used two large pieces of plywood to make signs for either end of our street. Lettering can be added with paint, cut in vinyl using a Cricut, or purchased online. Try to make these large signs as readable and professional-looking as possible, so people know you mean business. These signs should read: “(STREET NAME) CRAFT FAIR, Saturday.” Put up these large signs 6 days before your fair (so, if your fair takes place the following Saturday, you should put up the large signs the Sunday before.) If you don’t own the home on the corner of your street, ask for permission from those neighbors. If you’re lucky like we have been, neighbors will be happy to allow you to use their yards. The day of the fair, plan to put up a multitude of smaller signs, guiding people to your fair from the nearby busy intersections. Read more about setting up signage for your fair.

7. Advertise around the community

Pass out postcards two weeks in advance.

A great way to advertise to the households near your fair, is to print 4×6 postcards, add a hole-punch with a rubber band, and ring doorbells to invite people, or hang them on doorknobs if no one is home. (If you’re shy and don’t want to talk to anyone, just hang them on the doorknob!). Ask neighbors that you are friendly with to help pass out the postcards. We had a small “party” to hole-punch and add rubber bands, then our team each took a small stack of postcards and a map, promising to paper their assigned street about 1-2 weeks before the fair. If you have 25 cents, you can even use the postcard template we designed. Here is the link!

[Link to postcard template]

Tip: You can offer to cut the advertising fee in half for vendors if they help pass out postcards!

Read more about creating postcards here!

Read more about physical signage and postcards!

8. What we learned over the years

Once we realized how many vendors that didn’t live on our street were actually interested in participating, we realized that we needed to formalize a way for outside vendors to be included. So, we started charging them a slightly higher fee, and giving half of that to the house that hosted them on their driveway, in exchange for letting that vendor use their WiFi.

• The second year, we changed a couple things to this beginning process. We asked a few of our close neighbors to be hosts to visitors from outside the neighborhood, because we had several more interested parties. 
• We also charged a $5 fee if participants were willing to pass out postcards, and $10 if not (we didn’t think about charging anything the first year, so all of the advertising costs were on us!)
• Our street actually wraps around a corner and the other end of the street didn’t get as much foot traffic as our side did, so we’re thinking of asking more of our neighbors down our direction to be hosts, and to bring all the vendors our way just so they’re all in one area.

All of our free resource templates are available here.