Is This Market for Me?

Kerri Svoboda-Musick, The Sweet Tea Woodshop, @thesweetteawoodshop

Figuring out if a market and the vendor fee is worth your time can be tricky for handmade artists. There’s so much effort that goes into preparing for a market: creating inventory, tagging products, promoting the event through your channels, loading your car, physically driving there, unloading, setting up, and being “on” to sell to customers for multiple hours, packing back up, and unloading when you get home. PHEW! Few things are worse than going through all of that effort for a low yield day. I want to give you some tools to help you discern which markets could be a good fit for you. 

If you’re in your first year of doing markets, please know there’s some trial and error involved. A market may fit the criteria below, but not get the results you hoped for. Or vice versa - it might not fit the criteria, but it went really well. It happens! This isn’t a peer reviewed research article, but rather some guidance on what to expect for a typical market. You’ll figure out where your people are in time, too!

Also, not all makers measure market success solely by profit. There are other benefits from being at markets like networking with other makers, getting leads for custom orders, having your work appreciated by the community, general visibility, etc. For this write-up, though, I’m focusing on cash cash money because that’s something easy to quantify.

Determine your expectations.

The fee. You should expect to sell 8-10x the fee to consider it a “good” market. 

On average, markets with a higher fee mean higher foot traffic because a portion of your fee is paying for advertising in the community, the market is established with a loyal following, there’s a history of good sales, etc. It’s not always true, but usually. 

Foot traffic conversion. Knowing an approximate number of attendees is helpful. Now, not every market coordinator will have this information, but it doesn’t hurt to ask! At an average show you can expect 1 - 3% of attendees will buy something from you. 

How is this helpful? Well, next I want you to check your POS report for your average sale dollar amount. Over the past year our average sale was $28. Then, multiple the anticipated # of sales from above by your average sales dollar amount. 

Putting it all together. 

For us, we take the lower end of the sales goal column (using the x8 multiplier instead of x10) and use 1% of attendees buying something from us just to be conservative. The way we determine if the market opportunity is a good fit is with this equation:

# of attendees x 0.01 x average sales > vendor fee x 8

Or, more simply put:

Estimated Sales > Sales Goal

Example 1. There’s an upcoming local market that has a $100 vendor fee. There’s also a $25 application. The estimated foot traffic is about 5000 people. For this, I would combine the $100 fee and $25 application fee and consider it “vendor fee.”

(# of attendees x 1%) x average sale $ ≥ vendor fee x 8

5000 x 0.01  x $28 ≥ $125 x 8

50 x $28 ≥ $1,000

$1,400 ≥ $1,000

Since the estimated sales are greater than the sales goal, we’d apply for this market!

Example 2. There’s a market that’s about 90 minutes away that is accepting applications. There’s no application fee. The vendor fee is $75. The estimated foot traffic is 2500 people.

(# of attendees x 1%) x average sale $ ≥ vendor fee x 8

(2500 x 0.01) x average sale $ ≥ vendor fee x 8

25 x $28 ≥ 600

$700 ≥ 600

This one is a little trickier. Some questions to consider when it could go either way. . .

• How far is the commute? How does gas costs calculate into this?

• Is this a geographic area I’m trying to gain a larger following in?

• What time does set-up start and breakdown happen? What time will I need to wake-up to be there on time? Would I need to get a hotel based on start/end time?

• How do markets affect my energy? If I don’t need to get a hotel, will I be up for the 90 minute car ride home?

For us, we would probably pass on this one. If it was local, we’d probably go for it since we used conservative metrics while calculating.

Some final thoughts.

This is just one way to discern what markets are a good fit for your business. Some other things we’ve found helpful is to ask other makers who have more market experience where they’d recommend looking. See if you can find photos or videos from previous years of the market to see what the crowd looked like volume-wise.  You can probably find a line-up from previous years to see if your work would fit in. (i.e. Is it handmade? Is there a variety of makers from different mediums?)

Happy Making, Make(HER)!