Lemonade stands are a quintessential summer experience and a great way to embrace the heat, but they can also teach your kids valuable skills. I recently appeared on The Broadcast to share some of my favorite ideas for creating an extraordinary lemonade stand. With these 10 Tips for a Successful Lemonade Stand not only will you have the best lemonade stand on the block, but you and your kids are guaranteed to have a great time!
1. Location, Location, Location
We’ve heard it before but location is key, if you want your lemonade stand to earn lots of money you’ve got to pick the right location. Consider setting up your stand on a busy street corner, near the neighborhood swimming pool or another highly visible area (like the grocery store or local sports event, but remember you’ll need to get permission and possibly permits first.) And if you decide to set-up in front of your house make sure you pay special attention to tip #3. 🙂
2. Give It Some Curb Appeal
Sure you can throw out a card table and a few chairs, but a few extra details will go a long way to making your lemonade stand “stand-out!” We made our very own lemonade stand from free fence boards and jazzed it up with a pretty fabric banner made from scraps of fabric. I took it a step further and used the FREE printables from Love the Day to create cheerful decor for our lemonade stand.
3. Advertise
It’s no fun setting up a lemonade stand and waiting all day for customers to come. Teach your kids about marketing and the power of advertising by creating door flyers, posters and posting on social media. With the free printables from Love the Day we filled in the details for when and where we would be setting up our lemonade stand. We took a walk around the neighborhood and hung them on our neighbors door. Now, everyone knows when to come by for a refreshing glass of lemonade.
4. Be Creative, Think Outside the Lemonade Box
Don’t just limit yourselves to serving lemonade at your lemonade stand, consider offering additional treats for customers to buy. We like to offer cupcakes, homemade rice krispie treats, lollipops or bubblegum. My kids love helping in the kitchen and get super excited about making special treats just for their lemonade stand. We used the free tags from Love the Day to package our rice krispie treats and party circles to make our cupcakes standout! I printed out the blank menu from Love the Day’s party package, put it in a picture frame and used a dry erase marker to write down our items and prices. This way we can reuse it and change what we offer and the price as needed.
5. Quality is King
Don’t skimp on the quality, serve good lemonade that will keep them coming back for more. Now that doesn’t mean you need to spend days squeezing fresh lemons to have the best lemonade, you just need to make sure that what you are serving tastes good. I like to use good old fashioned Country Time Lemonade, but we add fresh strawberries to it to give it that little extra flavor that makes it so refreshing!
6. The Price is Right
Don’t be afraid to charge a lot. People don’t buy for the lemonade, they buy because your kids are so darn cute! Honestly, who can resist a lemonade stand?!? We usually sell our lemonade for $o.50, but occasionally we’ll sell it for $0.75 and the extra stuff is what we will price higher. This is also a great opportunity to talk to your kids about money, supply and demand and cost vs. profit.
7. Spread the Wealth
Now that you’ve priced it right, advertised and given your stand some killer curb appeal make sure you spread the wealth and share. We like to add a charity component to our lemonade stand and let the kids pick a charity they would like to donate half of their earnings to. Not only are you teaching them about earning and saving money, but you are showing them the importance of giving and helping others. It’s a great experience to see how excited they get to help others.
8. Be Friendly and Polite
Talk to your kids before hand about what good customer service looks like. Remind them to use their manners and be friendly and polite. With three kids we worked out a system so everyone feels included and our stand remains friendly and fun. Someone greets the customer and “takes their order”, the next kid fills their order while the other takes their money and gives change. They switch roles after a while so everyone gets a turn (and practice) with each role.
9. Set a Goal
Before you set up your stand set a goal to keep everyone on track. This also helps them feel a sense of pride and accomplishment when they reach the goal. Your goal can be as simple as “we’ll set up for an hour” or “we will sell 100 glasses of lemonade.” If you are raising money for a particular charity or event your goal can be more monetary focused, but either way having a goal is key to a successful stand. For this stand we had a goal to sale 2 of our Make Your Own Lemonade Stand Kits to help raise extra money for The Birthday Party Project.
10. Have Fun
Now that you’ve planned and created an extraordinary lemonade stand don’t forget to have lots of fun! That’s what this summertime staple is all about, having fun and being a kid, the extra learning and creativity is just an added bonus!
Be sure to check out the video below with my kids TV debut on The Broadcast and our favorite ideas for making our summer lemonade stand fun!
Love this! That lemonade stand is fabulous!
Thank you, luckily my hubby doesn’t mind making all kinds of crazy projects for me to pretty up!
I love that stand – we try and do one every summer. That kit idea is awesome!
Thanks Keisha, the Lemonade Stand Kit is one of my all time favorite ideas I’ve shared over the years! It makes great birthday gifts too! 🙂
this is such a great idea to start a lemonade stand.
These are great tips! I always have wanted to do a bigger lemonade stand with goodies, but when we lived in SC everything would just melt. Now that I’m up in Wisconsin, I think this is just the post I needed to jump start our own! We always donated to the animal shelter. So fun!
Love it, so cute. Love the video too. Your kids are adorable. Lots of great ideas and now I’m thirsty for some lemonade with strawberries.
I love your stand!! Recruiting the little girls upstairs to try a lemonade stand!!
My son just asked my husband to build him a lemonade stand. This is super fun!
This is so cute! I definitely want to do this when my kids are older. If I saw this stand I would probably buy as much stuff as I had money in my wallet. I’m not kidding – the kit, a few glasses of lemonade, and a few cupcakes. Mmm!
That is AMAZING! I love that you mentioned location — I see lots of little ones putting their stands in a cul-de-sac. Great for playing, not so good for selling!
I’ll have to give this one a try! Thanks for linking up with The Thoughtful Spot!
That is a fantastic looking lemonade stand! Thanks for the tips! I love the charity component :). Visiting from SITS Sharefest.
Oh this looks like so much fun! And also with so much educational potential!
Visiting from the Inspire Us Thursday link up. This is SO cute! Thanks for sharing 🙂
Okay, this is seriously so awesome and how COOL that the kiddos got to share it on TV!
Thanks for linking up at Wordy Wednesday. Love this!
Wow!! my friend and I are going to make a LS. (lemonade stand) I don’t know how to make it catchy and hot. I also want it to be organized and pretty. And are those lemonade stand pics real? If so, wow.
Thank you Abigail, yes these are actually pictures from our lemonade stand that my kids set up frequently during the summer. I think if you follow some of our tips in this blog post and add a few special details it will be great!
Thanks I will! And Should We bring our siblings b/c everyone thinks they’re adorable.
I was able to use your tips in helping me with my business project! I needed those helpful hints to get started. Now I want to make a lemonade stand this summer. Thank you! 🙂
Glad you were able to use some of our tips, have fun with your lemonade stand this summer!
Wow! This is amazing! I will definitely do this with my friends even though I am a teen haha. Also, do you have a recipe or a link to make the really cute lemonade lollipops?
Thanks Val! I bought the lemonade lollipops at Michaels, hopefully you can still find them there!
Can you make lollipops
how do you make the lemon lollipops
Hi Emmy, I purchased those from Michaels.
how do you make the stand
My husband made the stand from on old fence, unfortunately I don’t have a tutorial for it. But it sounds like something we may need to recreate because I get asked this question all the time. 🙂
Everyone is in Texas these days…
Great tips though!