On 12 November the wooden huts go up across Cardiff city centre, and for the next six weeks the place will smell of cinnamon, frying onions and wet wool. Small Business Saturday follows on 5 December. If you have a stall, a pop up or a shop window, thousands of people are about to walk straight past it, and I’d give you about three seconds before they’ve moved on to the man selling cheese the size of a car tyre.
Watch a Christmas market crowd for ten minutes and you’ll notice nobody actually browses. They shuffle. One hand on a pushchair, the other wrapped round a mulled wine that’s too hot to drink and cost too much to put down. Their eyes slide along the tops of the stalls at about head height, looking for something to snag on. That’s where your sign is. Or where it should be.
Your stock doesn’t get a look in until the sign has done its job. You can have the best chutney this side of the Severn Bridge and it will sit under that trestle table like a wallflower at a school disco if nobody can work out what you are from the other side of the walkway.
And a lot of market signage is grim. The A4 sheet in a plastic sleeve, taped to the table and curling up in the drizzle. The vinyl banner somebody’s nephew knocked up, with six fonts, a clip art sprig of holly and the phone number in pale yellow. Pale yellow. On white. Five decades in this game and that one still makes my eye twitch.
Stand in the road and squint
Your customers will judge your stall from across the walkway, not with their nose against the canvas, so do the same. Walk twenty paces off, turn round and squint. If you can’t read the name and work out what you sell before you’ve finished squinting, nobody else will either.
Make the name big. Add a word or two that says what’s on the table. Cwtch Candles beats Artisan Lifestyle Creations every day of the week, because one of them actually tells me something. Go dark on light or light on dark and don’t fanny about in between. And bear in mind it’s pitch black by half four, so whatever you print has to survive festoon bulbs and the odd phone torch.
Stop writing essays on your banner
Paying for a big banner does something to people. They feel they have to get their money’s worth, so on goes the website, the phone number, the email, Facebook, Instagram, the opening hours and a photo of the dog. Nobody reads any of it. One glance buys you your name and roughly what you do. Everything else can go on a card.
This is also where you find out whether your logo is any good. Squash it onto a price sticker, then stamp it in one colour on a brown paper bag. Done right, a logo copes with that without any fuss. One that only works on a screen will fall apart in public, usually while the queue for the bratwurst is watching.
The card in the coat pocket
Plenty of people won’t buy on the day. Their arms are full, or they need to text the sister in law about her ring size first. What they take home is whatever bit of you ended up in their hand, whether that’s a card, a label on a jar or a sticker on a paper bag.
Come January, when they’re turning out their coat pockets, that scrap of print is your entire shop. Put it on decent stock. Keep the colours the same as the sign. Make sure the web address goes to a site that works on a phone, because the second sale tends to happen at eleven at night on the sofa with the telly on.
The Thursday phone call
From the middle of November every printer in South Wales is flat out, and every designer gets the same call. “I need a banner by Thursday.” We’ll always try. But the fewer days you leave, the fewer proofs you get to look at, and a spelling mistake two metres wide will hang there for six weeks while people photograph it. Get the artwork sorted now. Read the proof. Then give it to someone who didn’t write it, because your brain will quietly fill in what you meant to say.
One more thing if you trade in Wales. Put a bit of Welsh on the stall. Nobody’s asking for a full bilingual operation, but a Nadolig Llawen on the banner, spelt right and given a bit of room, tells people you’re from round here before you’ve opened your mouth.
If your stall or shop window needs sorting before the crowds turn up, come and see us at Cog Creative in Rhoose. Banners, signs, labels, logos, the lot. I’d much rather have that conversation with you this week than at nine o’clock on a Wednesday night with the market opening in the morning.
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