How to Create a Successful Garage Sale

Rise above the run-of-mill garage and yard sales using these successful strategies and tips.

Start by planning ahead and using creativity and imagination. If you have fairly expensive items in good condition, like jewelry, computer equipment, large household appliances and lawn equipment, you may want to advertise in the newspaper or local trading times or greensheet. Placing a free ad on craigslist.com is a must in any case. Having a multi-family sale with neighbor, friends or relatives usually brings the best response, and you can split advertising costs. Consider posting notes or flyers on grocery store billboards.

It is good to prepare during cold and wintry or rainy weather for the bright sunny days of summer. Select your for-sale items with care, dust them off and clean & polish if necessary. Minor repairs will often help. Having a hot glue gun, tubes of epoxy, carpenter's glue and plastic cement serve handily for many repairs. When your items are salesworthy, apply stick-on price labels with neatly lettered prices. A permanent marker works best.

Electrical cords should be secured in a neat bundle, using rubber bands or twist-ties. Test all electronic items and have batteries and an electrical extension cord available to demonstrate working equipment. Most people want to try before they buy.

Clothing, well laundered and attractively displayed often sells well. Consider setting up sturdy display racks with items on coat hangers to allow easy browsing for your customers. We sometimes offer attractive plastic coat hangers with the clothes at a small additional fee. Organize the clothes by gender and size. Have large price tags on individual items. Even worn items will sell, for example, try labeling old blue jeans "boys jeans for cuttoffs" and give a discount for bulk purchase.

Toys are a great draw, especially when clean and well organized. Even fast-food toys will sell consistently at 50 to 75 cents if in good condition. Kids want them and parents are usually glad to oblige. Battery-operated toys can be sold with batteries at an additional fee. Often we use the fee as a "bargaining chip", offering to throw in the batteries free to a hesitant customer. (We do the same with the coat hangers included with clothing).

Tools are a consitent seller. Almost any unbroken tool will sell if cleaned, oiled and polished. Again, organizing the tools by type and related function will make the sale. An example would be a combined deal, like the hammer with the jar of 1,000 nails or a few scewdrivers with the coffee can full of assorted screws. Combinations have more appeal than items alone and often inspire the hobbyist or tinkerer to buy for a project.

Computer-related gear sells well. Try to have related installation discs, backup software, manuals and tech pamphlets available. Orignal packaging can help. It inspires confidence and gives them something to cart it off in. Try to have the specifications and information available. If you've lost the original copy, it is usually fairly easy to look it up online, on the manufacturers website.

Now to the display setup. The general principle here is to have items displayed in the most attractive and well organized fashion you can muster. This is where planning ahead really helps. We live in the suburbs of a large urban area, so it is possible to find a lot of material, like boards and planking remnants in excellent condition that are set out on the curb for bulk trash pick-up. We occasionally have utilized items such as broken tables and desks; for example, taking the good solid-wood desktop and mounting it firmly on the sturdy frame and legs of the worn but structurally sound table. Note: Care must be taken to have everything set up on well-assembled diplays that WON'T collapse, tip over or fail for any reason. It is a good idea to test displays before placing the sales items, rocking and shaking them vigorously. If you can, have an experienced carpenter or handyman helping out.

Taking time to label items and displays with neatly lettered, colorful and clever signs will boost your sales significantly. For example: a box of books, on one day drew little attention, while the same box, on the next day with a sign saying "Science Fiction" with little bolts of electricity and a list of well-known authors on it sold immediately - one person bought the whole box!

The same principle applies to the signs set out on the street. We collected the wooden stakes left behind from old election posters, and made our own large hand-lettered signs with the street address on the bottom. We bought inexpensive white posterboard and used wide-edge, permanent markers in three colors. The large block lettering had blue outlines and red fill. Our signs towered above the dull cardboard and hastily lettered signs of our competition and definitely drew more traffic. Think Legibility and Visiblity.

Another strategy to consider is offering snacks and refreshments at the sale. Our boys hosted a lemonade and refreshment stand, with cookies for snacks. The sales were good and it was a valuable learning experience for them. They got to keep the profits and spend them on recreational activities.

Now you may be thinking "Whew, that's a lot of work!" Well, if you try to do it all at once, it would be. But with advanced planning and spread out over several weekends, it is manageable and well worth the effort, especially if you have a large sale to raise money for a charitable cause and have other helpers to divide the workload. Superior efforts yield superior results. Good Luck and Happy Sales to You.