How We Select – Images

Enamel badge of Yarningham mascots Boris and Donald

In this blog post about how we select exhibitors I want to talk about images.

On our application form we ask you to upload 4 images to support your application. These images should represent what the applicant would bring to Yarningham. We ask that 3 of the images are of products and 1 of their stand at a previous show or festival. If the applicant hasn’t exhibited at a show/festival before we ask them to supply 4 images of representative products.

There are image guidelines for the application form. We specify what format the images should be in and how they should be labelled. We also ask for information about the image including product type, name and price.

We know that not everyone is au fait with technical terms for images or how to change their images so that they meet our guidelines. So we provide an email address on the application form to get in touch if you are having any problems.

If you are selected the images you provide on your application form are used for marketing purposes including on our website, social media accounts and in promotional material.

We are looking for clear concise images where the product featured is centre stage. To achieve this you don’t need to be a professional photographer. I took the image used in this blog post with my phone. Whilst a professional photographer would be able to produce a better photo the image is a good, clear representation of the enamel badge which is what I wanted.

The best recommendation I’ve seen for taking photos of products is to invest in a background. A large piece of plain paper will do and is much easier to use than fabric (saves on ironing too!)

In the next post about how we select I’ll talk about what we are looking for and a little bit about scoring applications.

How We Select – The Application Form

Yarningham Exhibitor application form used in 2017.

Usually at this time of year we would be receiving applications for the next Yarningham. As we all know 2020 has not been a usual year.

We thought we would share some more details about the application process. We have always tried to be as transparent as possible about our application process and we hope this information will help anyone looking to apply to the festival in the future.

So first up is the application form. We think this is the fairest way to assess applications. Exhibitors are selected blindly, based solely on their application form. This helps us to ensure that 50% of our marketplace each year is new to the festival.

The application form is simple. In the old days we uploaded a Word document or PDF to our website for people to download. We’ve since upgraded to an embeddable form that automatically files each application on our shared drive.

We ask applicants for their details (business name, their name, website, social media accounts and a short biography). We then ask them to upload 4 images that represent what they would bring to Yarningham. 3 images should be of products and the 4th an image of their stand at a previous show. If they haven’t exhibited at a show before they should supply 4 images of products.

Once the images are uploaded they then need to submit their application form and that’s it. Yarningham exhibitor application completed.

In the next post I’ll explain a bit more about the images you would need to apply.