7 tips to INCREASE SALES at vendor markets as a small business owner // pop-up shop advice

people always say to me I would love to do pop-up shops but doing pop-up shops is so much work and totally not worth it I could never pull off an inperson event the vendor fee for craft fairs is so expensive and it's so not worth the money wrong all of these assumptions are wrong inperson events are the bread and butter of small business owners especially who have handmade Goods brands in just a few years of doing these in-person events I've made over 1,500 sales gain thousands of followers and most importantly I've gained confidence as a small business owner and I'm going to show you how you can do all of this as well let's get right into it tip number one is know what the heck you're getting yourself into this applies to small business owners who have already been doing a good amount of pop-up shops and also people who have never done one before and are interested in starting when you sign up for an event you want to absolutely know what you're walking into the day of the event this is opposed to showing up not really knowing what the event is about having your same setup that you would normally have for every single event not researching how many people might show up not researching the demographic traffic of people who might show up all these are Big mistakes because when you show up to an event you want to make the most of it you want to put your best foot forward and make your brand as appealing as possible to the people who are going to show up to this event one way you can do this is that a lot of markets that are markets that have been happening year after year they have Instagram Pages Facebook pages where you can go and see what previous years were like you can look up pictures to see how much foot traffic there was you can DM other vendors who you know have been going to this event multiple years in a row and ask them what the crowd is like don't be afraid to email the event organizers because they are so helpful the fact that there are these organizers that are trying to get small businesses together to make some sort of craft fair or event street fair whatever it is is so cool and you know that they're there for you so definitely email them and ask them any questions you might have research the area that you are going to be doing this event in if you're not from the local area or it's a few cities away from where you live you definitely want to look up what the town is like what are the ages of people living there is it mainly family amilies couples young people older people is this an area where local small businesses tend to thrive or are you going to kind of have to like cater to people who don't typically shop at small businesses this is all really important information to know because that will help you prepare better for going into the event it'll set your expectation properly before going into the event knowing relatively what you might encounter when you get to the event by doing a little bit of research you can also cater your booth setup your inventory that you bring your TX lines that you end up saying to people you can cater all of that stuff to the specific event for example if I'm doing an event in a college town where I know a lot of the people coming by are going to be 18 years old through maybe 22 years old they maybe don't have as much money in their pocket then I can bring a certain set of my inventory that I know will cater to them or I can even create specific inventory that is super specific to that town I always talk about how I make these toe bags in the same exact design but have the different names of different cities that I do pop-ups in so if I'm going to a Jersey City pop-up shop I'll put the Jersey City words on there because I'm mainly based in Hoboken I'll normally put Hoboken on there I've made New York City once I made East Brunswick New Jersey once so many knowing that people are really proud to rep the place that they're from and the place that they live don't be afraid to do a little bit of research on the group of people who might be showing up and cater your products to them by doing this you will be exponentially more successful than the vendors who didn't look up who was going to be coming knowledge is power and the more you know the more you can prepare and set your expectations accordingly tip number two every single popup shop experience is a good experience stick with me here for those of you who've been doing markets for a long time you may say that no I've been to a bunch where it was unsuccessful I didn't make any money nobody came well I would say that was still a good experience because you learned something from it you learned that maybe that event was not good for your type of brand or you might have learned that your booth setup does not attract people as much as you wanted to or maybe at a market where you didn't meet your sales goals you still met a bunch of people whe whether it be the vendors the organizers of the event your friends might have shown up there's always something to take away from every event you do and going into every popup with that mindset will keep you satisfied with the overall experience if you go into events hoping to only make money and having that be the only form or metric of success then you're going to be disappointed more times than not especially when you're starting out other good experience things you can get from events is you can create content while you're at the event we'll get into that a little bit later you can draw inspir ation from other people's boots I'm not saying copy people but you can look around and see how other vendors have decided to set up their boots and gain a little bit of Knowledge from their experience booths some of my favorite popup experiences have been strictly because I met such great inspirational small business owners we've become such great Instagram friends and every time they post about a market that they're doing I'll go ahead and hop on that as well so it's just like a really great networking experience as well so put your little positivity cap on and just think to yourself there's always going to be something worthwhile coming out of an event which means when you're first starting out sign up for a ton of events even if you don't think every single one of them are going to be monetarily successful they will be worth it in some other metric form number three be confident never humble people say the only time you can brag about yourself is during a job interview but I say wrong another time you can brag about yourself and the work that you've created your business is at popup shops you want to let people know that you're confident in the work you've done done you've done your research you've made the best art or food or whatever product you're selling because when you're confident people believe you and you should be confident you did create something with your own hands with your own mind so why not brag about it a little bit one thing that's really helped me with my confidence is mastering my skills that I need to run my business and also optimizing my productivity in my daily life in order to get a lot of experience with the stuff that I do as a small business owner and I've learned all these skills through skill share thank you so so much to skillshare for sponsoring this portion of the video guys do I even have to say it again I will just in case but I've been talking about skillshare so much CU skillshare has literally changed the game for me as a small business owner skillshare is the largest online learning community for creatives and professionals with thousands of classes in so many different topics literally anything you're interested in learning about illustration graphic design photography music handmade Goods sewing email marketing building your online brand productivity literally the list is endless I've taken so many courses on here each class is taught by the best of the best instructors who are Professionals in their field on top of taking classes like introduction to artificial intelligence and a class on user experience design and another class on how to do 3D animations you can also start a learning path learning paths are curated sequential class collections to master a specific skill or competency so for myself I really want to get multiple instructor's point of views on how to use procreate that's a new application I'm trying to pick up I think it could really up my graphic design game with my small business I picked up this learning path called procreate Basics get started with digital illustration basically the learning path takes you through six different classes Top by six different instructors with multiple lessons within each class so that by the end of it you just feel like you went down this path of learning to the point where you know what you're talking about now with this topic another one I've been loving as a small business owner is creative productivity Kickstart and sustain any project this learning path is awesome because these instructors are quite literally my role models I've actually already taken the how to organize your workflow to maximize productivity by Ali abdal and I can't wait to take it one more time during this learning path because that class I don't even know how to explain to you guys how much it changed my outlook on life and productivity and getting things done and being a business owner it changed everything in 2024 I am in my learning era and if you guys also want to hop on this bandwagon you can use my link in the description the first 500 people to use my link will get one month free trial of skillshare by investing in yourself and your business and learning new skills you will become a better business owner and you will gain confidence when you're talking to people at pop-up shops vender markets and just in general become a better version of you and business owner in 2024 thank you again to skillshare for sponsoring this portion of the video tip number four go all out with your vendor Booth display period guys it is so worth it to invest in your vendor Booth people judge based on how things look it's inevitable we all do it but when someone is walking a few hundred ft away from your booth their peripheral vision is deciding if they will stop by your booth or not of course there are some really great customers who come by every single booth at the craft fair and just say hi to everyone which is awesome but in order to get more foot traffic inside of your booth you want people to look at it from far away and be like wow that's a beautifully curated Booth I should go check it out the way you do that is invest in not only really high quality inventory which I know you guys already have but also investing in really high quality displays this is the year I did a vendor Booth glow up and it exponentially increased my sales my foot traffic my social media following literally everything and I can't believe I waited so long to finally do it but I did explain all of my glow up type things in this video and this video but just real quick the one main thing that really helped me out was having all of my inventory closer up up to eye level and then also having all of my displays look very cohesive I got almost everything I have from vertical ledge and I know that it is a big investment especially to kind of like scrap everything in your vendor booth and get a whole bunch of new things it'll definitely take time to get to that point but if you've been doing vendor markets for a long time whether it be a year or two 5 10 15 years I definitely recommend you glowing up your booth investing in pieces that elevate the way your beautiful products already look something that looks different than the vendor booth next to you this will take a good amount of creativity you trying to figure out like what will make your own products look the best for me I have candles hands sewn Goods stickers and little things like that and I figured out what looks best for my booth that's one tip number two comes back into play doing a whole bunch of markets and gaining experience and seeing other people's boots eventually will get your mind churning with ideas and when you start thinking about upgrading your booth just do it it'll be worth it tip number five track everything and I mean everything let's start with the easy one sales I track all my sales through Shopify there's a Shopify POS app which stands for point of sale and basically in this app it acts as a little register or a checkout station it will pull directly from my inventory that I have stashed in the Shopify app it'll track all of the taxes I'm collecting it'll track discounts that I'm giving it'll also track the number of sales I make the frequency of sales that I make throughout the day how many of each product I'm selling each variation I'm selling like a whole bunch of analytics so I definitely recommend Shopify for that if you're still deciding which web service to go with I love Shopify I think it's the best for small business owners but even if you track things with Excel and you're manually typing things in which I totally understand if you're starting off that way what's really important about tracking all this information is that you go back and look at the information you collected after the event is over by going through my analytics I noticed that I'm selling so much more of certain items even though in my head I really thought I sold more of this other thing I always think oh I sold so many scrunchies and not that many candles when in reality I sold majority candles and not as many scrunchies I don't know why that happens but it's so important that you have that data and you get to look back at it so at the next event you know oh I should bring more of this candle because I sold 15 of them and I only brought 15 if IID brought maybe 10 more I would have sold those 10 as well it also helps you notice Trends maybe people are only buying the stuff that's the color pink at your booth that's like a random thing but kind of good to know maybe you can make more pink stuff or maybe people are only buying the stuff that you're placing in the front left side of your booth and none of the stuff in the back is being bought and you can kind of notice that while you're at the event but sometimes you're so in the moment you're dealing with customers you're taking pictures you're talking to people that you don't notice those things immediately all the time the day is really long by the end of the day you might forget so having everything tracked in some sort of app will help you manage your analytics better and help you do better the next time other than the shopy posos app I also use inventor which is a website where I track my inventory every time I make my products I track that I made a bunch of products in Inventor and it auto syncs with Shopify so I have everything tracked together tip number six use the pop-up experience as a Content creation day now if you're a small business owner and you are not on social media what are you doing I feel like social media is such an amazing place to be as a small business owner because you have the World in Your Hands back in the day when you were a small business owner the only people you could sell to were the people who lived around you or the people who would see your stuff at these in-person events don't get me wrong pop-up shops and vendor markets are really amazing places to make sales but you want that one customer to come back and the way you do that is through social media email marketing kind of helps text message marketing kind of helps but the biggest thing I think that people are really looking at is social media especially accounts that are very aesthetic very curated very up to-date and when you're at Pop shops you have all of your inventory laid out in front of you in the beautiful natural light a lot of the times you have people real time interacting with your products so you can take cool like pictures of course with people's permission if they're going to be in the picture let's be honest there are some slower events where you don't have crazy amount of foot tra you're kind of just twiddling your thumbs in the background for a little bit why not take some iPhone pictures bring a camera if you have a camera use that as an opportunity to update your product photography and that goes along with having a really nice vendor boot setup if the setup and the displays look really nice your pictures that come out of it will look really nice and when you post that people will start to see it get to know your brand a little bit more come to follow you and kind of know what to expect next time and by using that pop-up shop as a Content Creation Day you've kind of killed two birds with one stone and when you post those pictures online and get people to follow you that could translate into more online sales and that could also transfer into follow-up customers who are looking to see when you'll be at an event again so they can show up to that one and last but not least tip number seven show off your personality this is a big one if you're first starting out with pop-up shops it's nerve-wracking I remember being so nervous I'm my very first one in fact I didn't stop being nervous until fairly recently and so there's this like natural urge to kind of like stay in the background let people peruse your things not talk to them or talk in a very formal way but know that at the these events people are showing up because they want to support you a lot of people buy from small business owners because yes your products are amazing but another equally important thing is that customers want to be able to support a small business owner the person the individual let them know that you handmade everything with your Blood Sweat and Tears add in your own little twist of humor be polite crack jokes give compliments just be yourself and the more that those customers see that you're a real person with a real passion will be more likely to support you on top of that not even related to sales you have to recognize that this is a really big deal that you are at this event you've finally gotten around to doing your very first pop-up shop or if you've been doing this for a while you should pat yourself on the back that you continuously do these pop-up shops and overall you should just be having an amazing day just because of that fact at the end of the day these markets inperson events pop-up shops or whatever you make of it and I trust that you are going to be super successful in whatever way you define success but these are just some tips that have really helped me meet my sales goals help me stay really fulfilled and satisfied and grateful to be doing pop-up shops keep me productive with multitasking and overall all these things just help me be a better business owner so I hoped these tips helped let me know in the comments what you think if you have any more tips to share with me a lot of you guys are a lot more experienced than I am in this field so let me know what you think best of luck in your next pop-up shops and I will see you in the next one bye [Music]

Channel: monica razak

Views: 20,321

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Id: PKTsWF0EdkU

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2024