The van's loaded by six. Folding table, the good cloth, two bins of stock, the card reader, and the hand-lettered sign you redo every season. You back out while it's still dark and aim for the fairgrounds, or the town common, or wherever the white tents are going up this weekend.
Here's what gets lost in the loading. Your regulars, the ones who stop by on their lunch break and ask after your kid, have no idea you're twenty minutes away under a tent. And the folks who wander past your storefront at ten find the lights off and the door locked, with nothing to tell them you'll be back Monday.
A craft fair or farmers market is a fine day for new faces. But the people who already love you are the easiest sale you'll make all weekend, and plenty of them never hear that you left the shop. One short message, sent the morning you head out, closes that gap.
The message that does the work
You don't need anything fancy. You need a text that answers four questions a regular would ask if they called: where are you, when are you there, is the shop open, and why should I come. Keep it to a few lines. People read these standing in line for coffee.
Here's a version you can steal. The brackets are the blanks you fill in each time:
Morning! [Shop] is at the [event] today, booth [number] by [landmark], 9 to 2. The downtown shop is closed today, back tomorrow at 10. Come find us on the common, we brought the [thing everybody loves].
- The event and where you are. Name it and give a landmark, because "booth 24" means nothing without something to walk toward.
- Your hours there. When you set up and when you tear down, so nobody drives over at 1:45 to a bare folding table.
- What the shop is doing back home. Closed today, open tomorrow at ten. This is the part your storefront-only regulars actually need to hear.
- A reason to come. The new batch, the seconds bin, the thing that sells out by noon. One honest line.
Write it once and save it in your phone's notes, or in whatever tool you use to text your customers. Next fair, you open the note, swap the brackets, and send. Five minutes, not a fresh decision at six in the morning.
Send it to the right list, not the whole list
Your list is the set of phone numbers people handed you at the counter, the ones who said yes to texts. Treat that yes with care. A regular who signed up to hear when their custom order is ready did not sign up for a message every Saturday, and the fastest way to lose them is to turn into noise.
So two honest filters before you hit send. First, is this event worth a text at all? A big holiday fair or the first farmers market of the season, yes. A quiet Wednesday market you do every week, probably not, or your people stop reading you. Second, who on your list would actually care?
Most texting tools let you make a group or tag people, so you can send to some and not all. If you can tell who's a downtown regular versus who drives in from two towns over, good, split them. If you can't, don't overthink it. The message names both the booth and the shop's hours, so it serves the person who might come to the fair and the person who just needs to know you're closed today.
One social post to go with it
Not everyone's on your text list, and not everyone checks it the second it lands. So pair the text with one post on whatever account you actually keep up, Instagram or Facebook or both. Same four facts, plus a photo.
The photo does real work here. A shot of the booth half set up, the empty table and the bins, or the sign going into the grass, tells people this is happening right now and you're already there. Post it in the morning, not the night before, so it lands when folks are deciding what to do with their Saturday.
If your tool lets you schedule a post, you can line it up the night before to go out at eight the next morning, which saves you fumbling with your phone while you're hammering in a tent stake.
Where this falls short, so you're not surprised
A text is a nudge, not a map. Someone across the fairgrounds still has to find you, which is why the landmark matters more than the booth number. Give them a tree, a food truck, the corner by the band.
Weather is the other catch. If the fair gets rained out or you pack up early, the same people you texted at seven expect to hear from you at noon. That's fair, and it's on you. Keep the message short enough that a follow-up doesn't feel like a burden, and only text the list you're truly willing to update.
And a text won't reach the walk-up who isn't on your list at all. Tape a dated note on your door for them: closed today, find us at the common, back Monday at ten. The sign and the text do different jobs, and you want both.
Worth doing this week
You've probably got a fair or a market coming. Get the pieces in place before the morning-of scramble.
- Write the template once, today, and save it where you'll find it at six AM. Phone notes is fine.
- Open your contacts or texting tool and make one group of regulars who said yes to texts.
- Fill in the four facts for your next event: where, when, shop status back home, and the reason to come.
- Set a reminder for the morning you head out, and send it once. Not twice.
- Letter a note for the shop door too, with the date and your hours at the booth.
If wrangling the list or setting up a group text feels like one more thing you don't have time for, that's the kind of quiet setup we handle at MA AI Agency, so you can send it in two taps and get back to the tent. Either way the move is the same: tell your regulars where you are. They want to find you.