Are you ready to join our creative handmade community but don’t know where to start?  Here you’ll find everything you need to know on how to register for a Handmade Canberra market.   Don’t forget you can only register if your products are Australian Made!

Great photos.

This is possibly the most important thing you can provide, especially in the online world. A great photo will give us a great indication of what you are designing and the quality of your products. This is the first thing we will look at on your application. Please make sure to submit high quality photos. For some examples, see below.  Please make sure your photos reflect your Australian-Made, available-items only.

The Handmade Team use the photos you include in your directory listing for our media call outs, social media posts, blog posts and newsletters.  If these photos aren’t of the highest quality, it is likely that your business will not be featured in any of these places, in preference for a maker who does have good quality images.  Styled images are our preference because they work particularly well across all media platforms, and your images need to be cropped to a square of 800 x 800 pixels to ensure that they resize well, whether we are using them in web related media opportunities or on our social media accounts.

The correct naming of your images is also very important. We cannot stress this enough!  Your photos need to be named using the following format <Business Name> followed by <Product Name> eg. Bok Bok B’Gerk Cactus Brooch. When photos are uploaded by our members, they go into a central repository called the Media Library.  When we have over 600 people registered with us, and each stallholder is uploading 5 photos, well, it’s a LOT of photos.  If we are looking to promote you via our media channels, we MUST be able to find your photos and we can’t do that if your photos are not named correctly.  When we search the Media Library, we search for your Business Name first.  If your images are named correctly, your images will appear and we can insert them into our marketing projects easily.  If not, the search will return zero results and if this occurs, it will be likely you will miss out on the opportunity and another stallholder, whose images we can find, will be included instead.

Please also ensure that your photos do not include any watermark of any type. This includes any form of text overlayed on to the photo (ie. business name, product name or your logo). Likewise, please do not include any photos you have taken from Instagram that include the number of ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ overlayed (ie. the heart and speech bubble icons that indicate how many people have liked and commented on your post). These photos are unusable for any of the media opportunities available to you through us.

Tell us all about yourself.

Once you have your photos sorted, the next most important task is making sure the accompanying words accurately reflect what you make. When writing your profile wording (this is the box on the application form titled “If I asked your customer who you are and what you make, what would you say?”), please write it in the third person.  This means you need to write it as though someone else is writing about you.  Instead of using words like “I” or “we”, use words like “they” or “their”.  It can be helpful to get someone else to write this for you, if you find writing in the third person difficult.

• Use the first two sentences to tell the customer who you are and what you make. 
• Next, explain what makes your business stand out from the crowd.  Outline the products you offer to get customers interested in learning more.
• Use keywords within the text that your customers may search for when using the directory.
• Change this information around regularly to keep it fresh and exciting.

This wording is important for a few reasons. It is the main information given to customers to help them to decide whether they want to know more about your business.  If your profile information is too short, or isn’t kept up to date and fresh, customers may not click through to your website, meaning you are missing out on potential customers. 

The Handmade Canberra Team also use the profile information you provide for our media callouts, social media posts and information for our blog posts and newsletters, so once your listing appears in the Australian Made Directory, we need you to revisit it often to keep the information updated and fresh and exciting.  There are only so many times we can use the exact same wording about your business.  This is also why we need the profile wording to be written in the third person.  It helps us get more media opportunities across the line quickly for our stallholders.

The use of keywords that your customer may search for to find your business is imperative in your profile wording, to ensure you are being found when customers search the directory.  For example, if you are a jeweller and don’t include the word “jewellery” in your profile wording as a minimum, you will not be displayed in searches across the directory for that word. Think about what customers would most likely search for to find your product and use the 100 words you have to capture as many of these keywords as you can (while making sure what you write still makes sense!)

Short 5 – word description.

As well as providing a detailed description of your business for your directory listing, you are also asked to provide a short description of 5-7 words that explains your brand.  This needs to be a short sentence about what you make, not keywords. It is designed to give the customers a teaser for your business to help them decide whether they want to click on your directory listing to find out more.

Customers searching the directory are presented with over 600 businesses. Your business name, main image and the short description of your business provide a snapshot of your business to the customer to help them decide whether they want to know more about you and your business. 

The short description doesn’t need to be snappy and clever, it needs to tell customers what you do.  For example, a short description of “Hand painted laser cut jewellery” is a lot more helpful to the customer than “eco-friendly, fun, quirky, colourful” (keywords) or “a curious assortment of things”. 

The short description should provide enough information to the customer that if they couldn’t see your photos or your business name, they would still know what you make. 

Now you have all the information you need to submit a cracking registration form, hooray!

Best of luck, we cannot wait to hear from you.