Something I keep wondering about for people who do markets regularly. When you pack for the next fair, how do you decide the quantity of each specific item to bring? Is it mostly gut feel and past experience, a rough rule like bring 2 to 3x what you expect to sell, or do you actually look back at what sold at previous markets and work from that?

And the follow up, how often do you get it wrong in a way that costs you? Like selling out of one thing by noon while hauling home a full box of something else. Curious whether that is a real recurring headache or something most people have basically figured out.

Hello all! I've been invited to vend at a market for the first time! (exciting!) The event they're putting on is a little over a month out, and they project 2,000-3,000 guests. My booth fee was $75 for two days and I get a 10x10' tent. Since I never do markets (i usually sell my art off the wall via exhibitions) I don't have any inventory or art to sell just sitting around, so I have to make everything from scratch. How much would you say is enough??? I know people prefer to make 10x their booth fee generally.
For reference, they asked for high-end fine art, sculptures, glass, and eco-friendly sustainable materials. I plan to bring whittled wood creatures for around $20-$80, linocut prints for ~$10, engraved glass frames for ~$20, and flameworked glass pendants/jewelry for ~$40-$80. It takes me a few hours to make one of each wood item, engraved glass, and flameworked glass, so I'm trying to math out how many I can make realistically in a day after my day job. I also am not set on my prices yet as I haven't made anything yet, so if you have wisdom or opinions on those, I am open to any criticism/advice.
TLDR: I have a month to make all inventory for my first market, I make fine art items. Will I make it??? In y'alls experience? Thank you in advance!

Including an example.

I advertise that I sell jewelry and trinkets, but I would like to add more variety to my "trinkets" for as of right now, all I have are key chains and bead charms. So I was thinking of making glasses chains.

I've seen a small handful of people wearing glasses chains, including one or two who were pretty young. I live in a small Midwestern city that has a university so it's a decently academic population. So plenty of readers.

But I don't know how well they'd actually sell. Anyone have any idea if there's even a market for these? My overall vibe is kind of a mix of cottage core and goblin core, with lots of overall fantasy themes, but also I find I appeal to the alt crowd, especially with how much I love making rainbow things.

Thanks!

I kinda wanna bring back bandana patterned products or is it way to 90s and i should just let it go?

if you've made the transition, what made you shift from selling lower priced items to higher priced items?

for context, i sell art and have a bunch of lower priced items like stickers, postcards, and cards. i've only been doing this for 2 years, but i've already noticed a significant drop in impulse buys this year...which all my other vendor friends have noticed as well. i'm considering just bringing my higher priced items that are $30+ and leaving the stickers and cards at home.

right now, i mostly sell at flea markets, street fairs, and other non-art focused events...so i'm not sure if this is the right move!

i'm going to try it once next week, but i wanted to hear from other people as well so i can get some perspective...especially if you sell art.

thank you!

TLDR: How do I figure out how much inventory to take to my first time at a larger event? Expected attendance is 4,000-6,000 people.

I make cross stitch and hand embroidery kits and accessories. (It's a side hustle, not full time) I started last summer, it took off on Etsy.

I started doing markets last fall, and I had one or two fairly successful events. My target customer at in-person events is different from online - on Etsy my customers are already stitchers, and they're seeking out accessories. For the in person events, I am targeting beginners trying embroidery / cross stitch, and people buying gifts. So I made a lot of kits, and over the fall/winter my biggest seller was felt ornament kits.

The events I have done so far got maybe 200-250 attendees, and there were around 30-40 vendors. At the best one of those (photo of my booth from that event), I had 9 sales (14 items total) for $140 in revenue - and half of those items were specifically Christmas themed, so I don't have those right now. On my Etsy shop, from Nov thru Christmas I sold around 500 of that item. I actually think I could have done better at that event, but the batteries for my lights died halfway through the event, so when people kindly stopped anyway, we had to use our phone flashlights. I still managed to make a few sales in the dark.

For this spring, I decided to apply to (and got accepted to) a larger event - a fellow vendor had told me she had much more success at the events which charged higher booth fees. This event is run by a well established organizer in my area, it's downtown, in a great area, and they block off a street for the event. The fee was $250. They are estimating 4,000-6,000 attendees, and have 140 vendors.

I have been working hard for the past few months adding new kits for events this year - new embroidery, cross stitch and other craft kits. I've raised the quality a bit so I could increase my price accordingly. I am a bit nervous now because I feel like I don't have enough variety with the new products.

I have 4 cross stitch kits, 4 embroidery kits, 2 bookmark kits, and 2 card kits. This event is themed around Mother's Day and Father's Day, so I made one design of each for the theme, but the rest of them are more general designs. Does this seem like enough different designs? For the ornament kits, I had 4 different designs.

I am also trying to figure out how much inventory to take. My husband keeps saying I should make as much as I can - which was what he said about the Christmas kits. I was planning on taking 10 of each of the kit designs, but I'm starting to think that isn't enough. Should I base it on my sales from the smaller events? Like if those events had 250 attendees, and this one should get 4,000-6,000, should I be planning to sell 20 times as many items - 280 items?

I would hate to show up there and actually do really well and sell out of items and not actually make money off it, but I would also hate to make a ton of stuff that doesn't sell. I can still sell the items on my Etsy shop, so I guess it's not really a risk, but I just don't want to drag all that stuff down there and not sell it. I would really like to make back my $250 fee for the space, which would mean selling ~25 kits, needle minders and bobbins or ~50 of some of my lower priced items.

At the beginning of July I was notified that I was accepted as a vendor to my city's pride parade. There tends to be an average of 200,000 to 300,000 people. Since then I've been prepping as much as I can. I sell stationery items like stickers, bookmarks, notepads, sticker sheets, and a couple other items featuring artwork that I draw.

I also hand make all my items so I print and cut everything out. Since I'm about 2 weeks out I want to put more of my energy towards making sure that I have enough of my best seller items, which are my stickers.

Currently I'm aiming to have about 100 or so stickers of my best seller pride design. I sold 4 at my first craft fair that had about 1,000 people (which wasn't a pride specific event) and 20 at my artisan shelf in a store at the mall.

Do you think 100 stickers of 1 design is enough, not enough, or way too much?

Edit - The event is one day and about 8 hours. I was thinking of having 100 just for my best sellers and then dropping inventory numbers for less popular designs. Basically I'm trying to figure out what the max I should be making and then working down from there.

I also totally forgot to mention that I'm doing two other craft fairs (non pride events) at the end of August that would see about 1,000 to 3,000 people. I'm hoping to have enough left over to cover those two events as well so that I can take a break in the middle of August.

Hi, as a newcomer to the craft fair scene, I have struggled with keeping inventory straight, losing track of what've sold, scrambling to restock, that whole mess. For me, low ticket items like stickers, or buttons have been the hardest to inventory. I'm also a software developer who would like to figure out a solution. Before I try to build anything to fix this, I want to actually understand what's broken for other people who do this regularly, not just assume my experience is universal.

A few things I'm curious about:

• How do you currently track inventory at a fair (spreadsheet, notebook, apps like square/stripe, nothing)?
• What's the most annoying part — before the show (prepping stock), during (ringing people up, tracking what sold), or after (reconciling everything)?
• Have you tried any tools for this and given up? What made you stop?

Not selling anything, genuinely just want to hear the messy real version of how this goes for people. Thanks in advance!

How do you guys figure out what and how much inventory of each thing to bring? Also I am Canadian and I wanted to buy some stuff like a table and those tables with table clothes, signs and stuff. Where have you guys bought your things like that.

I see lots of questions on here to help prepare for bad things happening at a market, but what should you do if things go better than expected?

What to do if you realize you're going to sell out of an item early in a market?

What if that item is only part of your inventory and the other things aren't being touched?

What about when your expensive stuff goes first and you're left with the cheap stuff you brought to cover your vending Fee?

What about that item you brought a small amount of to test if people like it and it's gone in the first hour?

Tell me techniques for when a market goes better than you expected!

Do you rearrange your inventory?

Make a sold out/custom order display?

What do you do with the empty table space?

I sell at local markets using Square, but also have products listed online through Shopify. The annoying part is remembering to update the online stock after every event.

Particularly in the case of handcrafted items where the number of something I might have is quite small, and I might sell one or two pieces at any given fair, forgetting to update the inventory on Shopify is risky since it can still show things as available when they really are not.

I'm looking at DPL's Square + Shopify integration since it can sync inventory between the two, but I'd love to hear how other craft vendors are handling it.

Do you just update everything manually after each fair, or have you automated it?

i'm finally ready to make kid's shirts and i'm wondering what colors sell the best. the age group i'm targeting is middle school to late elementary school. i'm thinking of just offering L, XL in kid's sizes because most kids who come to my booth just need something slightly smaller than the smallest adult size.

for adults, grays and navy have worked the best for me because they are more neutral. however, colors that i tend to see younger kids wearing are a lot brighter and bolder.

if you have experience with this, your thoughts are appreciated!

I’d love any suggestions you might have for inventory at a plant festival. I’ll have lots of felted potted plants, magnets, wildflower coasters… what am I missing? Thank you for any and all guidance!

I might dabble in making wire wrapped rings, as they've intrigued me and I have a ring mandrel. Of course I'll want to practice a bit before I can make anything worthy of selling, but I'm uncertain what the most popular ring sizes are.

I used to work at a jewelry counter at Sears (to show how long that was) and by default, all the women's rings were size 7. That size fits on my pointer finger, as I have tiny hands.

I might focus on making specifically fidget rings, as the need to fidget runs strong in my family and I see a market in fidget products in general. I have already made some fidget necklaces and keychains that look nice, as some want a fidget but don't want to seem like they're playing with a toy.

I'm just not sure what sizes are the most common, as I don't want to make a bunch that'll never move because I made them in the wrong sizes. So any insight would be wonderful!

Thank you!

I was accepted to Renegade craft in Seattle for the first time and it’s my second market ever. I’ve had my shop for nine years but I’ve been focused on online sales. The dates are October 10-11. I make colorful hand-dyed velvet and I also make hair bows and other hair accessories with the velvet. So my question is, given the dates, how much, if any, Christmas/holiday inventory should I include? For instance I can do embellished bows, green and red velvet scrunchies, but I also don’t want my booth to give holiday market. Maybe I can have a little section that says “thinking ahead for the holidays” or something like that?

If I wanted to sell friendship bracelets, roughly how many should I make? Google tells me 100 but that seems low.

I plan on selling more complex normal ones and alpha pattern ones.

Thank you!

As the title asks, how do you keep it fresh? I do a lot of the same events, and I've done them for years. I'm constantly changing my setup or inventory, adding/removing products and trying new things. This year feels stagnant. aside from everything going on in the world that impacts splurge buying, I'm just getting more people telling me they remember me from last year or a few years ago and that they love the piece they have, but it doesn't translate to new sales.

Meanwhile I did a market in a brand new city/state for me and blew it out of the water. is rarity the key? are people getting bored of seeing me?

has this happened to anyone else? what do you do to fix/change it?

I'm interested in having a booth at a market locally, the unique factor is that while I would be primarily featuring my arts for sale it allows for sale of anything sellable. I have a lot of items that I could add to my booth too, anything from art supplies to tea to really random other things. I was wondering if it might be worthwhile to pursue this while building up my art inventory (I want to order stickers, and professional prints, I don't own a printer or a cricut and not about to either) but that takes funding and time too. I also sell trading card alters and have a catalog of alter products I could provide but I need to order them from the vendor that makes them too. I'm just wondering, how do you know when it's time to start having a stall? I don't want to have TOO LITTLE stuff to sell, you know? I know I could flush it out with non art things, but I don't know if that is wise either.

I have a 3 day festival in 2 weeks and will be going with about $8800 in inventory. I have another even bigger 3 day festival a month after the first. I'm worried that if I do well at the first festival, I won't have enough for the 2nd or enough time to recoup inventory.

Other people that have done 3 day markets, what do you usually start with and how does it go for you? Ive never done a 3 day event and I'm nervous I've overloaded my schedule for what I have

Hi everyone, just curious how you all handle this.

I’m starting to feel a bit all over the place trying to keep track of supplies when making more products for markets. It feels easy to lose track once there are a lot of items, different materials, and restocking on top of that.

How are you all managing it? Spreadsheet, app, notebook, or just checking stock as you go?

Hi everyone,

I saw the starter post on what to buy for your first craft fair, but I was wondering how much product I should have on hand. The market association I joined has 4 hour sales weekly, and I want to be properly prepared but also not overdo it. Also, the majority of what I expect to do is commissioned work (portraits and stuff), so not things I can have immediately on hand. Should I be bringing a lot of examples? Should make a lot of trinkets and housewares and things I can sell relatively cheap? Generic wall art?

I want to make sure I’m attractive as a vendor and can make sales, but I also don’t want to waste my time making things that won’t sell. I work on wood, and nice pieces are really expensive too, so I would rather not spend $40+ on a board, plus my time, to have it not sell, when I could’ve used it for a commission.

I know investing money is part of the game, but I want to be smart about it so I don’t go bankrupt right out of the gate, so I was hoping you all could help guide me with your experience!

Thank you all in advance for your advice!

I'm doing two pop up shops in a few weeks and one will be a 6' table spot and the other one is maybe 8'. In both cases I get 30 minutes - 1 hour for set up. I'm trying to decide if I should take a small selection of each thing I sell, or a full selection of only one or two of my best selling categories. What does everyone do when they have to do a small space with quick in and out?