Effective Physical Signage and Fliers for Your Craft Fair
Just like with a garage sale, signage is absolutely key when it comes to a local craft fair. You will want to identify nearby busy streets, and formulate a plan for how to draw people in.
You should get together with your team to create signs 2-3 weeks before your fair.
Here’s the signage plan we made for our last fair. The street where the fair took place is highlighted in magenta. The busiest streets run vertically on each side of our street, so we needed to figure out how to funnel people from both intersections. Large, Medium, and Small posters were used. So in the map, every time you see a rectangle with an arrow, that was one of our signs. The largest signs were posted at the two entrances to our street.
As mentioned above, we recommend 3 sizes of posters: the largest should go on the entrance or entrances of your street. It should go up about 6 days before the fair. So, if your fair is on a Saturday, put the largest sign up on the Sunday before. Here’s the design we used. We kept it very simple, so that people driving by can get the point right away:
Constructing Large Craft Fair Signs
You’ll want to make the large signs look as professional as possible. Here are some ideas for the base of the sign:
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- Use a large piece of plywood painted white. This is the route we took, because we already had a large piece that would do a good job. If you don’t have wood laying around, maybe a friendly neighbor does? Of course, there’s also the trusty backup of buying a piece at your local hardware store!
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- Check Marketplace or Craigslist for free pieces of wood. Even something like a door turned sideways would work!
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- You can have a large banner printed at your local print shop. This will look the most professional, but is probably the most expensive of the options.
Once you have your base, you will need lettering. Here are some options for that!
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- Buy some permanent vinyl, and cut the lettering out on a Cricut. If you want to go this route, this long roll of vinyl will be a good choice. Make sure you lay out the entire sign, sized to the final size of your sign, before cutting your letters.
- Painting your lettering is also an option! If you trust yourself to paint freehand, go for it! Be sure to sketch the letters in pencil before adding the paint, so you have a guide for size and spacing.
- Our favorite option to keep it simple but clean: Use a stencil to get precise lettering. The size of your stencil will depend on how large your sign base is, but generally, this 6-inch stencil should get you pretty close:
Once your sign is put together, you’ll need a way to stand it up. We found that the best way to do so, was to purchase 2 5-foot steel U-post fence posts, like this one from Home Depot. After driving the posts into the ground in the yard of our very kind neighbor who gave us permission to put a large sign in his yard, we cut holes in our plywood sign and attached the sign to the posts with strong zip ties.
Medium Signs
The next size is a Medium sign. They would go on major intersections, such as the streets that lead towards your craft fair from busy streets. All of our medium and small signs had a similar appearance: White with black lettering, plus a neon green arrow to tie them all together and let people know they were headed in the right direction. Note: Our first year, we added a date to the sign. We realized the next year that that had been a mistake since our fair was on a different date, and we changed all of the dates to simply say “Today.”
A great tool for Medium and Small signs is to use a common color, so that people easily recognize your signs as they drive down your street. You can purchase large 24×36 foam core or simple poster board from a local store. (When you only need a few pieces of poster board, it’s much cheaper to buy from your local Walmart or dollar store compared to buying online.) We liked a 3-inch stencil for our Medium signs, but a Jumbo Marker can also work really well! We also tied balloons to several of our signs for just a little more visual pop!
Small Signs
The small signs were similar to the medium signs, just (you guessed it) smaller! These were posted at shorter intervals along the route from the busy intersections, to let people know they were still headed in the right direction. Again, a common color like yellow works great to tie everything together, and I also have a free hack for your lettering: Print this PDF, and cut out the lines of text on the dotted lines. (The text assumes your craft fair runs from 9am-3pm.) Then, attach the lines of text to your yellow signs with packing tape. After that, all you have to add is your street name, and the jumbo permanent markers are a great tool for that! This combination of tools is a great way to make a lot of signs quickly.
Passing out Postcards
Passing postcards out to every house within a half-mile radius of your fair will make nearby households feel like they were personally invited. Here are the steps for creating these clever fliers:
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- Create your design. You can use our template, and just replace the photos with crafts from your craft fair (Canva makes it really easy to replace images with drag-and-drop!). Click Here for the Postcard Template
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- Download the resulting image as a high-quality JPG, and then upload it to your favorite photo printing website. I like to use Walgreens photo, because there’s always a coupon code running to get a really low price. The template is a 4×6 size, so it’s easy to get printed at a good price.
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- Punch a hole in the corner of the postcard, and run a rubber band through it. Then, you can hang the postcard on door handles if no one is home.
Ask the people on your organizing team to help pass them out, and don’t forget to assign anyone who payed a discounted price a street to pass postcards out to. Create a map, and highlight each person’s assigned street(s), so that people don’t overlap where they pass them out.
At our fair, a few good friends also offered to pass out postcards to coworkers and family. And then there was my mom, at the park with my daughter, chatting up everyone she passed. “Have you heard about our craft fair??” It was embarrassing but also, it worked. When we asked people how they found out about our fair, a lot of them said it was from our postcards!
If you ever feel embarrassed putting yourself out there and inviting people to your fair, remember: Our culture is one that loves garage sales, church sales and yard sales. This is the next step up, and people will be eager to find out what you have to offer!
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