We were lucky to catch up with Rebecca Hunter recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Rebecca thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

SoLo Craft Fair was founded by two makers, Rebecca Hunter (of Drawn Together Art Collective ) and Catherine Dunne  (of London Lily) back in 2016. Initially, the idea was to do a one off market, however, the concept snowballed and one market, became dozens of events (collaborating with other organisations such as Winterville, This is Clapham and Between the Bridges). Dozens of markets became a shop; The SoLo Craft fair Shop in Elephant and Castle. Using the shop as a base, SoLo Craft Fair is proud to work with over 60 makers each month, selling their products, offering free makers coffee mornings for networking and free business workshops. The shop is also a platform to raise money for local charities, for example during the London Pride month of June, 5% of all sales was donated to local LGBTQ+ young people’s charity, Metro Sparks. The shop also hosts community events, such as ‘Blind Book with a Date’ – where we give out free books to the local community.
SoLo Craft Fair has a huge emphasis in sustainability in their events, over the summer of 2021 when SoLo Craft Fair had a residency  at Between the Bridges on London’s Southbank, they planted a tree for every stall they hosted – planting a total of 900 trees in one summer.

Over lockdown, SoLo Craft Fair was the first market to host ‘virtual’ markets, which provided small businesses a free platform to showcase their wares in an incredibly difficult time for small businesses. This ran weekly throughout lockdown bringing in 100s of ‘visitors’ to their market- many small businesses actually made their first ever sale through the virtual markets!

SoLo Craft Fair has not only used our opportunities to help fight climate change, charitable giving and support for small businesses, we’ve done this in unique, creative ways. Within a few days of the UK lockdown being called, we created the virtual market, a concept that many other markets adopted within a few weeks – markets in the USA asked to use this idea so they could support makers their side of the pond

Every year SoLo Craft Fair evolves into something new, and we look forward to what 2023 will bring.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

SoLo Craft Fair is a market created by Makers for Makers. Rebecca Hunter (of Drawn Together Art Collective) and Catherine Dunne (of London Lily) wanted to create a market in South London which collided crafts, live music and workshops in unique venues. The events evolved bringing more of a focus on the craft market element, supporting more independent businesses. In 2021, we were given the great opportunity to open a bricks and mortar shop in Elephant and Castle. This has been a wonderful but challenging experience – we have had to battle the current climate of post-pandemic London, a cost of living crisis and the overall deterioration of the high street. On paper, everything was against us opening a successful shop, so we had to make sure the store had something different that could defeat the current pressures. We are pleased that a year into owning the shop, we have gone from strength to strength. The shop always showcases some of the best independent makers and designers, has a variety of events for small businesses and the local community and has a focus on sustainability. We provide our customers with an enjoyable and unique shopping experience.
The shop takes up most of our time, so we now only do 2 craft markets a year – these tend to be in Dulwich Village, giving guests a rural shopping experience whilst still being in the city.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

The breakthrough moment for us in terms of audience growth on social media definitely happened during the first lockdown. With the country closing down over a matter of days we knew how much this was going to impact on the small businesses we work with. So our immediate thought was ‘how can we adapt what we do to help?’

This is when we came up with the idea of our virtual markets on Instagram – we were the first organisation to come up with this concept and made it as accessible to as many small businesses as possible. All the makers had to do to participate was tag us in a story featuring one of their products between a certain timeframe, we’d share this story and thus producing a virtual market. We only had 3 days marketing time for the first event and had over 500 makers take part – and 1000s of people ‘visit’ the market, some businesses said they actually made their first ever sale from this initiative.
We put the markets on every Saturday throughout lockdown, although it wasn’t our intention to gain followers from these events – we went from 4000 followers to 10,000 in a matter of weeks.
So although most people will tell you the way to grow followers will be the standard; post regularly and like & comment on other posts – we do feel the best is to use these platforms to create a unique concept for the industry you work in. As we have all learnt form the last few years that life can change at the drop of a pin and its worth while responding to these changes by being as creative as responsive as possible.
Instagram alone as posts, stories, reels, lives – how can you use one of these platforms to create something new and diverse, that helps other people as well tells people about your brand?

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

When we started creating events – we used to try and include as many elements as possible – craft stalls, bands, workshops, dancers, live painting – you name it – we included it! Although this was probably beneficial for when we first started running markets as I do believe the diverse range of entertainment helped us get more press attention. But as the years went on, it was clear that most of our guests were coming purely for the craft market and not so much for the other entertainment, which was doubling our workload and costing us quite a bit of money and probably spreading ourselves a bit thin when it came to event organisation.
So although we initially thought more is more, it did unravel that a simple business model is always going to be the best – people know what to expect when coming through our doors and we can focus on running these events as smoothly as possible.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.solocraftfair.com
• Instagram: @solocraftfair
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/solocraftfair

Image Credits
SoLo Craft Fair Rebecca Hunter Catherine Dunne