Part 1: Scarves, Cowls, Mittens, Gloves, and Socks
I personally love looking for new and improved craft booth designs. I sell or have sold or helped sell in the past; clothing items (hats, scarves, cowls, gloves/mittens, shawls, wraps), yarn, lotions, soap, blankets, rugs, tapestries, macrame, looms, and books.
Looking at this list makes me feel like I have some knowledge on what works and doesn’t work in a few different areas. For now, let’s focus on the clothing category. There are a lot of us our there who make and sell a wide variety of wearable items.
If you’re familiar with my products, I sell outer-wear items such as hats, scarves, cowls, shawls, wraps, gloves/mittens, and socks. I have played the trial and error game so many times trying to find the right way to display my items. That’s why I am writing this post, to hopefully help someone like me eliminate all those costly trial and error steps. Instead, I hope you will take away from this post a workable idea for your clothing booth.
To make this article more readable and useful for you, I am going to break up each type of clothing into it’s own section. I will provide you with my trial and error, my final “I’m happy” display and of course other displays that inspired me from pinterest with a link to their website where you might find more ideas.
*There may be affiliate links throughout this post. That means if you click on a link I may earn a small commission at no cost to you! Here’s the details.
Scarves and Cowls
Let’s start with my biggest collection; scarves and cowls.
I have a thing for neck wear. I used to be that person who couldn’t stand having something around their neck and now… I can’t leave my house in the cooler months without something draped around my neck. It’s comfortable and unbelievably warm.
That’s why I started to design and make my own neck wear. Well… I went overboard and soon needed to figure out the best way to display them. At first I displayed them in a fan on a table.
As you can imagine, it looks nice, but just about every person who came to the booth browsed right over them and didn’t attempt to try any on! Ok, so that was not going to work. Back to the drawing board.
Next I hunted through pinterest. Here are some fabulous ideas that I love!
This was the very first booth with cowls that caught my eye. I just love the simplicity of this booth. She has some hanging and on a mannequin which shows customers how they’re wore. Very nice!
Again, another very simple display that calls attention to your work! I love the chalkboard ‘try it on!’ sign. It adds just a little something, something extra to encourage customers to touch and try and hopefully make that sale!
Now that I had a very new ideas, I tackled my scarf/cowl display once again and came across the best display for a variety of items in my opinion, grid cubes.
These grid cubes are easy to dismantle and put together making them great for craft shows! And they look super nice and professional. Once again I fan my cowls so customers can see all the lovely patterns, but now they have levels. By the end of the day, these bins are not as neat as they are in this picture. Meaning, customers have looked through them, touched them, and maybe even bought some.
Interested in adding these grid cubes to your display? Here’s the ones I bought:
So far, I like this display. I’m sure I will continue to tweak it as I attend more shows. What do you think? Do you like this display? How do you display your scarves and cowls?
Gloves, Mittens, and Socks
Who doesn’t like gloves, mittens, and socks? I already have gloves, I am working on adding knitted mittens to my inventory and I have a source for Alpaca socks that may be added to the booth soon. As usual, I am always hunting for ways to display my products to make them look good and sell.
I, once again, started out just fanning my gloves on a table. BORING!
Look at how dead they look on the middle shelf? Who would want to even pick them up to try them on? Not me. What was I thinking? Obviously, I wasn’t.
I didn’t need to go far to hunt for a better solution. I was quickly introduced to grid walls and the magnificence of them! Here’s my display now:
Wow, they look so much better! I can see all the colors, and grab the pair I want to try on without hesitation. I can proudly say this display gets A LOT of attention at shows. Every time I look up there is a group standing in front of my gloves, touching and trying them on. Then they move onto the rest of my booth from there. I’ve sold a lot of pairs of gloves from this display.
Here’s another glove display I was inspired by. I like the levels. If I had a smaller amount of gloves soon to have mittens and socks added, I’d consider something like this.
Loving these ideas? Here’s what I purchased to make it happen:
Are you inspired?
This post is getting super long, so I’m going to break it up into two parts. Thank you for looking through part 1 about scarves, cowls, mittens, gloves, and socks. I hope my fails and successes will help you design you’re own wonderful display! I’d love to see it.
Part 2 will cover larger clothing items such as wraps, shawls, blankets, skirts/dresses, and outfits in general. See you there!
Ashli