Craft Booth Design, part 1: Checkout

This season, I was faced with different booth sizes in each craft show:

• 8 x 8 at EtsyRAIN
• 10 x 10 at Urban Craft Uprising
• 10 x 5 at Crafty Wonderland
• 5 x 10 at Renegade Craft Fair SF (i.e. the left or right half of a 10 x 10 space)

I worked with the super talented Matthew Parker (of Matthew Parker Events) to redesign my displays for maximum flexibility and am pleased with how it has worked out. We made three major upgrades and one minor enhancement for this year. This post is about the first major upgrade.

Dedicated checkout area
This summer at Renegade SF, I was impressed with the Poppyhearts booth design, particularly her dedicated, obvious, clear checkout counter. I've often struggled to manage the "back of the house" stuff in an organized way - like where to stash my purse, where to keep shopping bags for customer purchases in easy access, and where to keep my cashbox so it's not visible & in the way.

The solution was under my nose the entire time: I own a bookcase whose shelves fold up and whose sides fold around, so it packs flat. It's heavy though. My friend Heidi of Max & Co. Postcards kindly altered one of my custom TCC-pattern tablecloths from Spoonflower to fit snugly around three sides of the bookcase (the secret ingredient is Velcro to hold the cloth to the bookcase!) and voila! Here are some shots of it at home, where I was playing around with the setup:

The bookcase shelves are prefect for holding all the essentials during the craft show!

I've got Velcro tape on bookcase, and Velcro sewn in to the cloth. Perfect!

Matthew created a simple yet elegant sign for the front of the bookcase: lightweight gator board with a vinyl This Charming Candy sticker. It ties to the bookcase via black satin ribbon.A white tray provides additional privacy for the cashbox and is great for displaying credit card logos to reinforce the idea that this is where to pay for your candy. Nice, huh!

Here it is, in action, at Urban Craft Uprising:

This Charming Candy craft show checkout counter... 

... at Urban Craft Uprising. Setup still in progress at this point.

That final picture hints at what my next posts about this year's booth upgrades will include...  stay tuned!