When you’re preparing your applications for juried art shows, you really can’t underestimate the importance of having absolutely fantastic craft photography. Acceptable, or even very good is just not enough here. In order to get into the very best shows, your photos should be remarkable.

Remember, the photos of your products are all the jury has to determine whether you’d be a good fit for the show. They are your most important marketing tool when applying to juried art and craft shows.

Unfortunately, a lot of the advice you read tends to imply that you can photograph your crafts yourself, and that will be adequate for getting into the best shows. If you have the equipment and skill to do great craft photography, you’ll be fine photographing your own products. However, I believe that would be the minority of professional craft artists, and if you don’t have the skill and equipment to take great photos, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice if you’re not working with a professional photographer who is skilled in craft photography.

If you are sending mediocre photos with your craft show applications, you are likely not being accepted to the very best shows. If you have not been accepted to the better shows, you may have assumed that your products were not up to their standards. While this may be the case, it is also very possible that you were not accepted simply due to bad photography. In that case, the money saved on not hiring a professional to create great photos is really a false economy in that you’ve lost more money in sales than you’ve saved by not hiring a professional photographer.

Do you have what it takes to take your own photos for juried applications? Read the book Photographing Arts, Crafts and Collectibles: Take Great Digital Photos for Portfolios, Documentation, or Selling on the Web and you’ll quickly find out (you can read my review of this craft photography book here). If, by the end of the book you’re thinking, “Yes, I know how to do that.”, or “I know most of that and can easily learn the rest”, taking your own photos may be fine. On the other hand, if you finish the book thinking, “Wow, there’s a lot of skill that goes into taking great photos, and I’m not prepared to develop those skills.”, and you’re serious about being accepted into the best juried art and craft shows, then you really need to find a good photographer who will take professional craft photos for you.

There are three basic aspects of retailing:
Design – the premises (your booth and its basic structures)
Merchandising – what you put in the premises (your display)
Operations – what staff do (you and anyone who might be helping you at craft shows)

While these retailing concepts are traditionally applied to retail stores, they apply to your craft show display too.

All three aspects of retailing are inter-related. That means that a change to one aspect impacts the other two factors. A cost savings measure in one area may cost you elsewhere. So, when you are designing your craft booth, it’s helpful to think through the ways that a change to one factor may impact the other factors.

For example, the design of your booth impacts merchandising because your basic booth design determines the amount of space you’ll have to display products and the level of flexibility you’ll have to change your booth based on varied conditions at different craft shows. Also, the basic configuration of your booth will impact operations because it will influence where you tend to stand or sit and how you tend to interact with customers.

Imagine, for example, you decide to take away space from your checkout area (which is tempting when you have limited space) to create more space for display. At your next show, you may discover that your check out area is inefficient and checking out customers has become much slower and awkward. If you are at a busy show, the extra time spent checking out customers may easily result in lost customers. If you miss opportunities to talk with potential customers because you are dealing with an inefficient checkout process, you can easily lose sales. In this case, you would have been better off displaying slightly less product while allowing yourself the space you need to deal with customers seamlessly and efficiently.

There are plenty of ways that the three aspects of retailing, design, merchandinsing and operations interact with each other to either improve or hurt your sales; this is just one simple example. When you design or make changes to your craft show booth, be sure to think through the ways that decisions about all three factors will impact each other.