Do rising temperatures have you weighing the pros of a garage sale (clutter removal, extra cash) against the cons (prep work, allocation of weekend time)? If so, get ready to say “be gone, cons” and put some extra money in your wallet. These garage sale tips and printables will make the hours you spend selling your once-precious belongings to strangers lucrative and, dare we say, fun.
Wanna add your own flavor to your garage sale signs and materials? Use these printables as inspiration, and cook up your own good stuff with our Design tool. Now pick some dates and start rummaging through your closets. It’s money-making time.
Advertise
To have a profitable garage sale, you need shoppers with that paradoxical form of currency—cold, hard cash that’s burning a hole their pockets. Attracting these garage sale enthusiasts is a matter of getting the word out.
Few advertising mechanisms are as quintessentially “garage sale” as good old fashioned signage. Make yours stand out from the sea of marker/neon posterboard combinations with our free printable signs, or design your own.
A few things to keep in mind:
Days (not dates), times, and the address are the most important bits of information. Make them prominent.
Hang a lot of signs, especially if your location isn’t readily apparent from a main road.
Make sure your signs look similar, so that shoppers know they didn’t veer off course.
Arrows are basically the kings of garage sale poster design. Draw them on our printable creations, or check out Arrows in the Graphics tab if you’re designing your own.
Use bright, eye-catching colors.
Keep it simple: people are most likely driving by, and won’t be able to read every detail on your sign.
Craigslist is the ultimate cyber place for garage-sale seekers. Create your posting in the “for sale > garage sale” category for your town/neighborhood, and make sure to add photos. The first photo you upload will display as a thumbnail next to your posting in a list, so amp it up with a few simple edits.
These are also great places to whet the consumerist appetites of the masses:
Your social media pages (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
Facebook groups in your area that focus on relevant subjects
Local newspapers
Garage sale-specific sites, like garagesalefinder.com
Garage sale apps
Prepare
Make sure you have everything you need to display your items, handle transactions, and stay happy while sitting outside all day with a handy checklist. Putting items on hangers, applying price stickers, and laying smaller things out on tables the night before will minimize the work you have to do before the first early bird shows up at your sale.
Price (or not)
Some garage sale gurus tout the importance of putting a price tag on everything, saying that customers won’t want to ask (and you won’t want to answer) questions about the price of every item. Others consider pricing an unnecessary and time consuming step. However you end up answering the “to price or not to price” question, make sure you have an idea of what you’ll take for your things, especially larger items. Unsure of the going rate for second-hand cheese graters? Conduct some market research by visiting a few garage sales in your area before hosting your own.
If you’re pro price tag, skip the standard dot stickers or scraps of masking tape and print your own with a couple sheets of sticker paper. It’s way easier than pie with our tools. Or you can download our printable price sticker sheet now, which is way, way easier than pie, or any pastry ever baked.
Keeping things in line behind the cashier’s table will help you complete transactions faster than a Best Buy cashier on Black Friday. Tackle boxes and muffin tins keep change organized, and unless crunching numbers is a favorite pastime of yours, keep a calculator nearby.
Get organized
Organization makes the difference between raking in the dough and just baking in the sun out front of your house. Group like items and use category tags to helps shoppers find the roller skates/immersion blender/jumper cables of their dreams with ease. If you’re designing your own category tags and want a look similar to our free printables, check out Labels in the Graphics tab.
Use rope, ladders, or whatever other clever idea you have rolling around your noggin to hang as much clothing as possible, and make sure that your items are clean.
You can also transform a “meh” sale day into a fully funded vacation by providing a testing area for electronics, placing big-ticket items near the curb to attract passersby, and treating the final hours like a fire sale. Put smaller items that didn’t sell into grab bags, and offer larger remaining items at half price.
