How to Host a Craft Holiday Market in Your Home

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Let’s wrap up this quick series on at home parties and workshops with your Silhouette or Cricut with how to host a holiday craft market in your home. If you’ve never attended an event like this, the concept is simple: it’s a mini craft show hosted in someone’s home – and similar to the home parties I wrote about yesterday. I have a good friend who has been hosting a large holiday craft market in her home each November for more than 15 years. She chimed in on this article and gave me her biggest secrets.

How to Host a Craft Holiday Market in Your Home

Before the Event

1. Gather a group of crafty friends and decide on an evening to hold the event. Like I previously noted, a weekday evening for an hour or two usually works well.
2. Decide what products each vendor friend will contribute to the evening. This concept works best if there is an assortment of products around a central theme, like Christmas. Products should complement each other and not work against other vendors. For example: Invite your good friend who makes jellies or jams, your favorite embroidery friend, someone who sells knitted goods, a pallet sign maker, a tee shirt creator, even independent consultants for large companies, and so on.
3. Decide on the number of guests that your home can accommodate, and be sure that each vendor has a limited of attendees.
4. Create a flyer with the details of the event for participants to distribute. Again, it is a good idea to offer an email copy and a printed copy.

At the Event

1. Set up tables around your home as well as light refreshments to serve to guests.
2. Have each vendor set up their products for sale as they would at any other craft show.
3. Set up products around your home from different vendors for sale. You could replace your current wall decor with products for sale or add a welcome sign for sale near the front door. Get creative and show guests the products in action.
4. Use a centralized checkout. It is easiest to have one person in charge of checkout and guests pay for the products from all the vendors at one time. This is easy to do if you provide everyone the same price tags in different colors. Each vendor then writes their prices on their assigned color coded tag, and attaches the tags to their products. When guests checkout, the cashier records each vendor’s sales and packages the products.
5. Consider having door prizes, a raffle, or goody bags with samples and business cards for each guest to take home. One strategy is to raffle off a one-of-a-kind gift basket that has a small sample from each vendor that participates in the event.
6. Matching tee shirts for all vendors can help pull the event together.
7. At the end of the event, the sales are totaled and money is distributed to each vendor.

How Do You Make Money at a Holiday Market?

First, you’ll sell the products you make at the event. Since the event is geared to be a close knit affair with friends of your friends, this is a great way to expand your local reach. Additionally, you could consider taking a small percentage of the total sales to cover your expenses and generosity of opening your home for the event or have the vendors pay a small entry fee. At-home holiday markets are definitely some of my favorite events to attend, have you ever been to one?

Christine Schinagl, Cutting for Business

Since 2015, Christine Schinagl has been helping crafters start and run craft businesses through her blog, Cutting for Business. As a Silhouette and Cricut crafter herself, she has a unique take on what works and what doesn’t work in the craft business world. She also teaches a course on creating digital SVG designs, available at How to Design SVGs.

cuttingforbusiness.com