Inspiration

One of the regular events that we participate in each month is the Handmade Hong Kong (HMHK) Sunday Market in Discovery Bay. We are never one to shy away from markets in our home towns and when we travel, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that we love participating in markets for Script + Sea. There is so much joy in selling your products face-to-face with customers; especially when 90% of the time our business is done online through our site. It’s a rare chance to meet our customers and get first hand feedback; there is so much joy in selling something you love to someone who equally loves it.

We’ve done a few of the HMHK events over the last year or so and each time we learn about how to set up more efficiently, what works best for certain stickers, what doesn’t work and how we can make our stall look better while best serving our customers. With that being said, we wanted to share our strategy on how we set up our booth in case you ever decide to take on the adventure of entrepreneurialism and try it yourself!

Here’s a view of our stall so you can see the big picture. We’ll break down each section and explain what we did and why.

 

Script + Sea is a start-up that is fully funded by me and Tia, so we need to find creative ways to ensure our branding is aligned, yet save on what can often be costly product displays. We actually ordered all of our display baskets and letter board on Taobao (think China’s version of Amazon but cheaper and customizable) and the bamboo boxes at the front of the table are from IKEA.

We decided to use this letter board because we needed something that would allow us to customize our message and easily change our prices since we do different events and sell different products each time. We also loved the color of the grey fabric and the wood boarder which we felt worked well with our brand name Script + Sea since it evokes a sense of nature.

For our individual sticker packs, we opted to go with seagrass weaved baskets and bamboo boxes since we have multiple price points and this allowed us to group the same priced stickers together. Boxes and baskets also make it easier for the customer to flip through the different packs. We thought about a turning hanging rack and we also thought about using a photo album as a mega sticker album where people could flip through but felt that the rack was a bit too clunky and we heard from other vendors that customers didn’t really engage with turning them. The mega sticker album just seemed like a lot of work for not a lot of return considering we would have to maintain it and if we ran out of stock it would be hard to reorganize.

 

 

One of our best-selling type of stickers is our laptop stickers. We are currently using this wooden box that we found on Taobao, which was originally a smartphone display box (can you see it now?) but one of the things we’ve noticed is that it can be quite difficult to get the smaller stickers out such as the banana and the pickle since the space is small and narrow. This may be one of the displays we need to rethink in order to make it easier for the customer to pick them out. It works really well for the larger laptop stickers that you can see standing up in the back rows like the Ma Lut, Lionheart Graphics and D.Kcum so maybe we just need a better display solution for the small laptop stickers only.

 

 

This large display is great because it can be easily dismantled, it’s on brand and it shows off the taller sticker packs well. We use it to show our MU Lifestyle Print-On stickers because we have a lot of designs so we feel it’s the best way to show a good variety. On windy days, we use a bit of blu tack to stick the back of the pack to the wood so they don’t blow over. We also use a string to attach the back and front legs so that it doesn’t do the splits on us and collapse. Again, we got this on Taobao for a steal!

 

Here’s a perspective view of our stall where you can see that we try to maximize our real estate by hanging a jute string across the top and then using colorful clothespins to hang some of our Ease Around laptop stickers. This area definitely has opportunity to be better but we haven’t quite figured out how yet. Sometimes our customers don’t even realize that we’re hanging stickers right in front of their faces so I think we can improve.

 

Finally, in our quest to be more sustainable, we decided to not make business cards and instead we’ve stuck our QR code to our Instagram to the side of our booth instead since it has our website linked to it which has all of our contact information and products anyway. We still have people asking so we’re contemplating making our own stickers again where one side is a sticker and the other has our business information. If you have any of ideas for us on any of the above, send us a note at hello@scriptandea.com!