How To Sell Soap At A Festival - Case Study I end up at a lot of festivals, and different events like that, and most of the time I either am selling something, or I'm helping one of my family members with a craft booth. In other words, I'm there as an exhibitor or a vendor. Otherwise I wouldn't be there!!! From all these experiences I've formed some opinions about how to sell soap. This particular event was the old time fiddler convention in Athens, Alabama. This event is about 50 years old. It attracts participants and spectators from many states, many thousands of people are here for the weekend. There are a lot of craft displays as part of the festivities. No offense, but the "craft show" is far from a high-end event. There are political booths. There are some of, what I would call, flea market booths. There are a lot of vendors with items they are just reselling. This is not a high-level juried show in other words. There was a lot of soap at this event. There were at least 5 booths, of the 150 or so total, that were mostly about soap. Maybe another booth or two had soap as well. Here are where I think all these soap vendors were missing out on sales. None of the soap booths had any pictures of the soap making process. None of them had any pictures of their place. Nothing to show anything about who they are. Most of the soap was mostly just alike. It was white soap with some colors here and there. All the vendors were using standard tents with little to set the displays apart. Soap was mostly priced at high end levels. Only one vendor really had a volume discount to encourage buying multiple bars. A lot of people really make little tiny bars of soap. How much more does it cost to make a really hand sized 4 1/2 ounce bar of soap, as compared to the little barely 4 ounce bars? Not much... Give people their money's worth... In addition, one of the vendors forces anybody who wants to look at the soap to come into the booth. I guess the idea is to present the set-up like a store, so you come into a store. This drives many people away. Looking at crafts should be simple and non-threatening. Browsers buy too. This is a huge deal. Make it easy to look at your craft and you get more sales. Now one lady had a really nice display of goat milk soap. She had no pictures of her place though. That's a mistake. Where are the goat pictures? Nothing is much cuter that a baby goat doeling. No pictures. She also was singing the praises of her products for curing various ills. Really? This is likely illegal, and not necessary to sell soap. So I could see all sorts of ways that one or more of these soap vendors could have really "cleaned up," but I got the word that at least one didn't do so well at all. To turn that around would have taken a little different approach, but not a lot of extra time or money. What it takes to sell a lot of soap is great products, clean packaging, and the right approach to displaying and presenting those products. Then you must make it easy for buyers to follow up and buy more. Those follow-up sales make the soap business a real winner. Soap down the drain is an opportunity to sell more. For more tips on how to sell soap, check out the first page of this site. It's here...