West Coast Craft is a San Francisco institution and my favorite show to vend. This was my SEVENTH time doing their big indoor show which happens twice a year - once in June and once in November - featuring around 250 vendors. Unlike their smaller, single-day outdoor shows that occur monthly, this event is held inside the Fort Mason Pavilion across both Saturday and Sunday. It costs $925 + $25 application fee for a 10x10 booth with wifi and backdrop dividers provided.
Luckily I was blessed with a corner booth this time, which allows me to set up the booth in a way that really caters to the heavy flow of foot traffic we see at this event. If you want to see how I set up my booth for a non-corner booth, check out my WCC Winter '25 Debrief.
I really liked the layout I used at the Summer '25 show, so I pretty much did a repeat of everything I did there.
The big star of my booth was my disco-fied golden gate bridge. I made a ton of San Francisco-specific items for this show and I wanted something big and flashy to highlight that we are a local business. So many people stopped to take a pic of it or came up to me that they saw my video about making it and wanted to see it in person.
The hair claw and keychain display is the same as previous years (read more about it here)
I am a huge fan of the wire cube organizers that I've started using in the past year. It allows for a great deal of customization in how you hang things off of it and the ability to store extra inventory underneath for easy access. Using reusable zip ties on acrylic shelves continues to be unmatched in its versatility as it works on pegboards AND metal grids and can be used to display anything from bumper stickers to cards to stash boxes.
I had not used the clear business card racks for several years but they have recently come back into my rotation as a great way to display my lighters.
Stickers are always the most crowded space in my booth - we have around 90 designs and offer a 3 for $10 bundle. Zip tying 3 grid walls together to form a freestanding tower allows for the most eyeballs with the least amount of traffic jams. I organize my stickers by theme: weed, politics, pride, feminism, and "everything else". I start with mapping out all of the stickers I want to bring to help whoever is assisting me in setting up, AND so that we have a reference for figuring out what sticker needs restocking if it sells out. In a particular stroke of genius, I also make my storage of the stickers match the map. For more about my sticker storage, check this video.
We had a whopping 48 new products at this show compared to our last showing in November. Some of that was from our April "Baked" sale, and some of that was SF-themed items I made specifically in preparation for this event.
We also had entirely new product categories, including cards, silk twillies, air fresheners, matchbooks, and socks. All of these categories did pretty well, except for the socks which we did not sell (par for the course for me at this event). I offered a 3-card bundle, but only 2 customers took advantage of that.
Our total sales number was extremely close to that of the Summer '25 show, which I viewed as a huge success considering the state of the world. I would have loved to see a huge increase considering how many new items we added this year, but like girl...the economy.
I don't put too much weight on comparing summer shows to the winter one because the winter show is ALWAYS crazier as people are shopping for holiday gifts. That being said, we sold about half as many keychains, patches, and blankets and twice as many tote bags as the winter show. Hats and pins/buttons saw the largest increase from the winter show which didn't really surprise me - our Critical Thinking hat has been very popular since it's launch and we added a bunch of new button designs.
I always wear my own product to vend - it immediately shows people how they can integrate the items into their own wardrobe. The first day I wore our Trinket Scarf as a top and got a lot of compliments on it. Customers frequently asked where it was from, despite having it hung up at my booth - which to me demonstrates the power of showing a product in-use. The second day I wore the Public Transportation silk twillies in my hair, along with our mini fairy claws and the Critical Thinking hat.
In the past, our San Francisco themed items have been some of our best sellers, so this time I decided to create additional products with that theme for this event. While products like our Heart SF sticker was our 2nd best-selling product, the same success was not had by the rest of these products. Our Sutro Tower print did not sell a single unit, and my personal favorite new SF product, the Heart SF keychain, only sold 2 units. I was delighted that we sold as many of the Public Transportation Twilly as we did! I even had some people come specifically for that!
It is worth mentioning that even our pre-existing SF-themed items that have been best sellers in the past did not maintain their best-seller status for this show. I am very curious how these items would do at a winter show where customer intent is more focused on gifting.
Unfortunately we were sold out of a few of our best sellers, like our marker stash tube, mini bread tag claw, mini possum claw, and rainbow trout hair claw.
The crafty little bitch pin, TV dinner tray, crayon lighter, and Abolish ICE pin maintained their spots amongst the best sellers at this show. We actually sold out of all 15 units of the "Men aren't funny" button that I brought, so who knows if it could have taken the top spot had I brought more.
We do not document which stickers people purchase when they check out - it is just documented as "sticker - one" or "sticker - bundle". This was the first time that I counted how many stickers I brought and how many we came home with so we could determine what our most popular stickers are and how much sticker theft is happening. I personally don't care about sticker theft - they are so inexpensive for us to make and are so easy to steal, it just doesn't seem worth it to stress over. But it's still a question we get a lot so I thought it was time to investigate.
Our sales report showed 678 stickers were sold, but we came home with 721 fewer stickers than we started with, meaning that 43 stickers were stolen or otherwise unaccounted for. That is a theft rate of about 6% among all stickers moved and 1.5% of total retail sales (same as the national average!). Stickers are the only category where we had significant discrepancies in our counts that would indicate theft. I take that as a win!
Overall this was a great show! I got to interact with a ton of returning customers and introduced my work to a healthy amount of new shoppers. If you have any questions about this event you'd like me to answer, drop a comment and I'll do my best to answer!
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