When prepping for your neighborhood craft fair, we recommend getting vendors in 2 ways: 1. Get people from your street to participate in the craft fair, and 2. Get vendors from outside your neighborhood to join you by setting up their booths on the driveways of friendly neighbors on your street. You can charge the outside vendors a little more (although we do recommend giving half of that fee to the host driveway-owner in exchange for letting the vendor use their bathroom and wifi).

First, Get Your Neighbors to Participate, and Find Out if They’ll Host Outside Vendors

Send out a flier and email to your neighbors. Have them fill out our free vendor participation form, where they can indicate whether they’d be willing to host outside vendors. Now, you have driveways available to host outside vendors. Be sure to track how many spaces you have available on those friendly driveways. After neighbors fill out their form and confirm they’ll host outside vendors, be sure to confirm with them that they don’t mind allowing the vendors to use their bathroom and WiFi, and will allow the vendors to set up at least an hour before the sale begins.

Next, Advertise for Vendors

In our experience, there are lots of craft vendors who are excited and always looking for places where they can sell their wares! At our past craft fairs, vendors became even more excited when they saw how well we handled our advertising, because there was lots of traffic all day at our sale, which means lots of sales for them. And, the time of year we chose for our fairs (early fall, a week or two before Halloween) ended up being a good time because it didn’t compete with larger, city-wide craft fairs, so vendors were free.

Search for Vendors on Facebook

If you aren’t already part of a craft fair group on Facebook, start searching for one or two. Neighborhood craft fairs aren’t huge events, so look for a group that is specific to your area. For example, since we’re in Colorado, I had the option of going with “Colorado Vendor and Craft Shows,” but that seemed a bit wide to me, so I’ve focused on a group for just Northern Colorado. If you live in a more metropolitan place, there is probably a group for your city or even region of your city.

Once you’ve found a likely group, visit it and make sure it’s active. There are plenty of Facebook groups that have gone a bit dead, either because the moderators lost interest, or people migrated elsewhere. So, make sure there are posts from the past couple of weeks. Make sure you don’t do all of this at the last minute, sometimes it can take awhile to be accepted to a group, and sometimes even your post will take awhile to get approved, depending on how fast the moderators work. So, try to do all of this a month or two in advance.

Here is some recommended text that you can use in your post, to find vendors! You can choose to link to the form, or if you’d like to feel people out a bit more, tell them to contact you, and you will give them the form.

We’re looking for vendors for an upcoming neighborhood craft fair on [date]! It’s just like a neighborhood garage sale, but for crafts! All kinds of makers are invited. Even if you don’t live in the neighborhood, we have friendly households that are happy to host you in their driveway. The fee is $20. Half of that goes towards advertising, and half goes to your host in exchange for Wifi. Respond to this post with any questions, or if you’re ready to apply, you can fill out our easy form to get added to the list of vendors: [link to form]

Now, add an image! We have a Canva template just for that purpose…all you have to do is fill in the information, and post it with the text above.

Once you have vendors signed up via your form, review their information and make sure they feel like a good fit. Make sure they pay their fee before the date of the sale (we suggest $20, half of which goes to you as the organizer, and half goes to the homeowner). Then, figure out which driveway they’ll be in, and give them the address and time they can come set up.

Then, make sure you fulfill your part of the deal, which is to have good advertising to draw people to your sale. Learn more about that by checking out our other posts: Signage for your Craft Fair, and Online Advertising for your Craft Fair.

Let us know how it goes, and if you found any other tips for finding vendors!