Vendor Booth Display Ideas: What Actually Worked at Our Farmers Market Table

Most vendor booth display ideas online come from people photographing a perfect setup, not from people who’ve loaded a tent into a car at 5am for a year. These come from the second group. We’ve been setting up Celeste Naturals at farmers markets, festivals, and a Christkindl market for the better part of a year, and we’ve changed almost everything about our booth at least once. Markets give us a lot more than sales, and the display is the part where we get to run cheap experiments and see the results immediately. It’s also something we can pass along to retailers once we’ve figured out what works.

Here’s what stuck.

1. Plan for a 10×10 and one open face

Most farmers markets and vendor fairs hand you a 10×10 space. If you want more, you pay a second vendor fee for another 10×10. We use an instant canopy from Uline and two 6-foot folding tables from Home Depot arranged in an L.

We’ve tried a U shape with a third table (two 6-footers and a 4-footer), and whether it works depends on how much room customers have. At most markets, tents are packed close together, so people only get one “face” of your booth to consider. In that case, two tables works best. All your products go on the front table, and the table leading into the tent becomes your packing station for checkout.

2. Go up, to about chest height

Our biggest display lesson: more height is almost always better, within reason. For me, chest height was the sweet spot.

At our first market, the table legs sat right on the ground with no risers. Our displays added a tiny bit of lift, but people still had to bend over to pick something up, smell it, and read the label. No matter how good your product is, a sore back along with the experience isn’t a net positive. We’ve gradually gone taller, and our current shelves are four layers high, topping out around 1.5 feet above the table. Etsy has plenty of customizable display options if you want to find something that fits your products.

The goal is to make it as easy as possible for someone to consider what you sell. If it’s hard, cumbersome, or even mildly annoying, they’ll keep walking.

3. Tell people what you sell before they reach the table

Signage supports everything in tip 2. Someone who can see your sign but not all your products yet should be able to make a reasonable guess about what you offer.

When we started, we bought a hanging sign post that attaches to one tent leg, and we still use it. Our logo and company name sit on top, and placards below read: Handcrafted, Hand Poured, Bath and Body, Candles. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It just has to set expectations.

Over the year we’ve added more: a big banner behind us, a branded table runner for the center display, and a chalkboard with our items and prices written in liquid chalk. Everything is aimed at getting the customer information and a decision as easily as possible.

There’s a tradeoff, and I’d take it again. We may get slightly fewer people walking up cold. But with this much information visible, the average person who does walk up is much more likely to be an actual buyer. You also see the immediate reactions of people who decide to keep walking, which is free feedback.

4. Put the decision-making details where people can read them

We’ve updated our packaging so the critical product details are visible as people browse. We’ve also found moderate success adding extra information in some cases, like explaining the benefits of coconut-apricot wax or the vitamin profile of beef tallow. Not everyone reads it. The people who do appreciate that we’re being as upfront as we can about why the product is worth buying.

5. Organize by scent, and keep the order the same everywhere

At our first market we just grouped like products together, and with only a few products that was fine. Now we sell soap, body wash, body yogurt, candles, face creams, serums, body oils, lip balms, and more, so we’re deliberate about it. People appreciate logical groupings and consistency.

Here’s how it looks from the customer’s side, left to right:

Body wash and body yogurt. We group these by scent, not by product, so someone who wants to bundle a wash and a yogurt in the same scent doesn’t have to hunt for the matching pair. The order doesn’t matter as long as it’s consistent. Ours is always Vanilla + Almond, Grapefruit + Bergamot, Seaside Escape, then Santal Rouge. Those four scents run across all our scented products, and that order carries to every other display. We put Seaside Escape and Santal Rouge next to each other because they’re our best sellers.

Candles. We start with those same four core scents in the same order, then add the seasonal scents. We think about which ones will overpower their neighbors. Our Smoke Show candle is a nuanced campfire scent, so we don’t put it right next to something as intense as Sacred Saffron or Golden Incense. As people move down the line, we want them to be able to actually experience each scent.

Soap. We use a 12-slot vertical display instead of a shelf. The top row is our core four scents in the usual order, the second row is reserved for tallow and salt soaps, and the bottom row holds our goat’s milk soaps.

Everything else. The remaining products go wherever they fit. We keep a small box of lip balms up front, since they’re a good impulse buy while people are checking out.

6. Put your best sellers out front

Our best sellers aren’t far apart in price, so we don’t organize by price. But if you have items that cost a lot more than the rest, it’s worth thinking about, either to highlight them or to put them somewhere that’s harder to swipe if someone thinks you aren’t paying attention.

7. Think carefully about testers

Testing took more thought than anything else.

Soap and candles are easy. Our soap boxes have a scent window, so people can get an idea of the smell without opening anything. Candles don’t have contamination concerns, as long as nobody sticks a fingernail into the wax.

We don’t sample body wash. We never have access to water, and we don’t want customers walking around with sticky hands and nowhere to wash them.

Body yogurt gets testers. We put a tester in front of each scent, marked with a “Scent Tester” sticker. The challenge is that it’s hard to smell the yogurt through the packaging, and we don’t want people unscrewing the lid and exposing it to the air and possible contamination. That’s another reason we keep a consistent scent order. We use the same fragrance across body wash, yogurts, candles, and soaps, so it’s easier and safer for someone to smell a candle before putting a yogurt on their skin. We don’t have a “Please don’t open” sign. We just pay attention and gently steer people toward the candle. Bonus points if they fall in love with it and buy that too.

8. Protect your product from weather and sun

Our products aren’t weather resilient at all, so removable tent walls have been one of our best purchases.

On the first Sunday of this year’s Georgia Apple Festival, the remnants of Hurricane Isaias brought a very windy, wet day. We normally set our tables as close to the outside edge as possible, so customers don’t have to commit to walking into the tent. That day, we flipped it. We put up the walls and moved everything back, which protected us and, more importantly, our products from damage.

Walls also help with sun. Coconut-apricot wax has a fairly low melting point (which is why it’s great in wax melters), so even on a chilly day, a product sitting in direct sun can sweat or melt. At the Christkindl Market last year, our booth faced directly west, so we had intense sun on our display for hours in the afternoon. Great for lighting, bad for product protection. Heat taught us a lot about our body butter, and if you can’t find shade, even one wall on the sunny side can limit the damage.

9. Light your tent, and check it from the customer’s side

Most markets we do are during daylight, but a few are night markets that need extra light, and there’s often no electricity. We use cordless LED work lights from Home Depot. They work well, but we need about four or five spread around the tent to light everything.

One more tip: don’t judge the lighting from inside. It almost always looks brighter from in there than it does to someone looking in. Step outside and see what your customers see.

10. Make checkout central

We try to keep checkout in one place inside our displays. When Chrissy and I work together, I take payment while Chrissy bags the product. A big line can be a little cumbersome, but we haven’t found a better setup. The cash box sits out of sight behind a display. About 95% of our customers pay by card or tap, so we rarely open it.

What we’d buy again

Looking back, there isn’t much I regret ordering, because as a new business I didn’t know what would work. My one piece of advice is to get table risers and tall displays instead of starting short like we did. These are the purchases I’d make again:

1. A tent that’s easy to set up and has removable walls. You may never use the walls, but if you need them, you’ll wish you had them.
2. Sturdy tables. We’re constantly loading, unloading, unfolding, and refolding, since we’re rarely set up for more than a few hours. Buy tables that can take it.
3. Comfortable chairs. You’ll stand a lot, especially when customers are at the booth, but you’ll want a good place to rest during downtime.
4. Clear signage. You don’t need blinking neon arrows that scream “COME CHECK ME OUT,” but don’t underestimate reasonable, quality signs. They can really change who ends up in your tent.
5. A compact cooler. Markets are long, and in Georgia they’re often hot. We spent a lot on food and drinks early on. A cooler with ice and a few of your favorite drinks can turn a miserable market into a pleasant one. We never go without one now.

None of this is complicated. These farmers market display ideas all come back to one idea: make it easy for the right customer to say yes.