Mrs M’s Handmade is a business created by my wife & daughter-in-law (both Mrs M’s) to sell their handmade lotions, soaps, scrubs & balms. The younger Mrs M is currently taking time off with our # 2 Granddaughter, so Mrs M’s Handmade is now a duet of the elder Mrs M (she hates it when I say that) and myself: I do the heavy lifting, setting up her booth. She suggested in the beginning that I should make cheese boards & cutting boards to sell … and so now, 3 years later, that’s exactly what’s happening.
Next month, we will do our 100th craft fair.
Mrs M is now on the 4th iteration of her booth; it’s a purpose-built display that was built last year, and described on Lumberjocks, here.
I have now built 2 more pieces for her display, completing this 4th iteration of her booth. She needed a lip balm dispenser, so I made one that holds 8 flavors of balm. This was the first thing I ever made using pocket hole joinery. The piece comes apart with the base separating from the vertical unit, and then the sign lifts off of the top. It all stores for transport – with the product still in the slots – in a plastic shoe box-sized locking container.
The sign was laser engraved with Mrs M’s logo and “Lip Balm” in her signature Segoe Print font.
The final piece is for her ZooSoapia: kids’ soap in colorful animal shapes. She needed a cage to keep the animals in, as well as some small shelves around the cage to display the critters on. And, again, the piece comes apart for transport in a locking container, though this one is larger to accommodate the 14”x14”x8” base, er, I mean zoo.
Construction is with Hard Maple primarily, though I did use Oak dowels (as the rest of her display is made exclusively of Oak).
The letters on the ZooSoapia sign were laser-cut out of thin stock, and then painted & glued onto the hard maple sign that was also engraved with the logo for Mrs M.
It is a challenge to build appropriate, transportable, durable and attractive display pieces for craft fairs. Our first booth used some routed bowls that I had made that Mrs M, uh, appropriated for our very, very humble first display just 3 years ago.
We soon graduated to a large step unit to add verticality to our display and as a complement to those bowls, but also discovered that a stiff breeze will blow lotion tottles off the step unit … so we had lotion cascades regularly with this set-up.
We added more step units in 2016, but still didn’t solve the cascade problem, unfortunately. No one said I was a quick learner.
We’ve solved the lotion cascade problem with the big display that came out last year, but we’re still confronting the problem of how you crowd more display space into a 10×20 booth … and more product into a 6×10 trailer. We’re adding rolling carts next week, so stay tuned!
