Doing a Craft Home Party

I hope this means you’ve decided to give it a go! Doing a craft home party really is a fun way to sell your crafts – you get to chat for ages about your hobby to people who are actually interested, and make money at the same time, and there’s usually a glass of wine or a cup of coffee in it for you too!

How do you accept payment? Please take a moment to fill in this short survey about how best to accept payment when selling your crafts.

The most important things you need to worry about (apart from not getting wine all over your beautiful creations) are:

Inviting Guests

Obviously you want as many people browsing (and buying) your creations as possible!

Read here for some tips on inviting guests, to make sure your craft home party is well attended.

Pass them on to your hostesses as well.

A Happy Hostess

It’s important to make this a wonderful experience for your hostess as:

• You probably want her to host another home party for you
• You want her to tell her friends how great it was so that they book parties too
• A stressed out, grumpy hostess is not going to set the scene for a happy shopping experience for the guests

One of the most important parts of keeping your hostess happy is the hostess incentives. Giving her great gifts or discounts that make it worth her while mean that she’ll want to do it again, and will spread the word to her friends. Because there are so many different crafts and they all have different values, it’s difficult to give exact guidelines on incentives, but here are a few general bits of advice on setting up your incentive structure.

A Dazzling Display

The way you display your crafts will have a big impact on how people react to them and whether they buy or not. But this needs to be balanced with keeping it quick and easy to set up – if your hostess is holding a 2 hour craft home party for you, she may not want you around for another hour both before and after as well! Read these suggestions on setting up a good home party display.

Lots of Sales

Generally this isn’t a problem at a craft home party, provided your crafts are of good quality. But as crafters we’re not usually born salespersons, and there are things you can do to make sure you sell as much as possible – read these tips to increase home party sales.

Booking More Parties

Provided you want to keep doing this, booking more parties is important. And the best place to get parties booked, or at least find potential hostesses, is at the craft home party you're doing now. Finding new hostesses was the biggest learning curve for me, but hopefully my advice on booking more parties will help you get the hang of it.

Checklist

Quite often it's the little things that make all the difference, but they're the easiest to forget. Use this checklist to make sure you've got everything you need to make your craft home party great!

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