Craft fairs can be a fun way to sell your crochet. You get a day out to meet your customers face to face and you have the chance to meet other small business owners and make new friends within the business community. But you’re ultimately there to make money. But how much can you make by selling your crochet at craft fairs?
The truth about craft fairs is that there are just too many variables involved to give you an estimate about how much it’s possible to make from events.
It all comes down to what you’re selling, how many customers come through, your price points, how much stock you have and a little bit of luck too.
What we can do is make sure that your expectations for your day at the fair are realistic.
https://youtu.be/Sal2hCqjKGg
Use Your Own History As A Guide
If you’ve attended craft fairs before, the easiest way to predict how much you will make in the future is to look at what you’ve made in the past.
If you’re attending the same events this year as last year, you know how well they went. You can use what you learned from those events to improve your profits by taking more stock that sold well last time, looking at if your prices could be increased or even adding some offers on bundles of items that sold well.
This is also why it’s always a good idea to keep notes on each craft fair you go to, so that if you do go again you can see what went well, what sold the best and keep notes of any questions you were asked so that you can adjust what you’re offering on the day.
The Real Limit Is Time
The real limit to how much money you can make from craft fairs is how much time you have to make your stock. After all, how much crochet time you have determines how much stock you can make to take with you.
Your profit is tied to how many items you sell, which can be limited to how many items you’re able to take with you.
From there it’s down to your prices and how much profit you make from each sale.
Setting A Realistic Target
To avoid disappointment from how much profit you take home after your day at the fair, you need to go in with realistic expectations.
No matter how prepared you are and how much stock you take, always keep in mind that there is a degree of luck to how well your day goes. If there is a sporting event happening nearby on the same day or you’re at an outdoor even and the weather turns out to be bad, then fewer people will turn up which will impact your takings.
Outside of that, have a realistic target in mind. Yes it is possible to sell out, but if you take stock worth $600, it’s not possible for you to have a $1000 day. On top of that you do need to account for the costs of the fee, transport costs and any other costs associated with your day that will impact your overall profits.
So what is a realistic number for what you can make from a craft fair?
If your target is to make $10,000 in profit from craft fairs over the season, then that’s probably unrealistic. When you take away all the costs of attending all those fairs and how much stock you’d have to make for them all, it’s very unlikely that you’ll hit this number. But if your target is $1000 over the season, then you have a much better chance of hitting your target.
Having a realistic target in mind is going to help you feel much more positive about how well your day went even if you end up with some stock that didn’t sell.
Price Is The Lever, Not Time
The best way to increase how much you can make at each craft fair is your prices.
Crocheters are generally speaking terrible at pricing. We tend to significantly under price ourselves. So the chances are that there is plenty of room for a price rise for your crochet so that you can increase how much profit you make from the craft fair. Even raising your prices by 10% can turn a $500 profit into a $550 profit which could cover your table fee or pay for more yarn for your next event.
Or to think of it another way, it’s $50 less stock you need to sell to reach your target. Pricing higher takes the pressure off as to the number of items you need to sell to reach your expectations for the day.
Match Your Stock To The Event
Never forget the power of research when it comes to making sure that you have a successful day at the craft fair (you can read my article on that here). That research is going to make sure that you take the right kind of stock to the right events.
Tailoring what you sell at each event is another way to ensure you get as many sales as possible.
At a fair in a farming community then practical items for the home are likely to sell well – think storage baskets and hotpads.
For events in communities with lots of young children, then nursery décor, hair clips and kids clothing and accessories will do well.
Matching your crochet makes to the right event will make your sales higher than if you just take the same old stuff to every event you do.
Every Sale Is A Bonus
Whatever your goal is for your craft fair, just remember that every sale is a bonus and a learning opportunity to ask yourself what went well with that interaction, why did they buy and can I replicate that with someone else.
It’s easy to get down hearted when a craft fair doesn’t quite go your way, but there’s always something to learn and improve on for the next event so that you can make more sales than you did that day.
A quiet day at the fair can be disappointing, but there will always be an element of luck to these things. Try not to take these days to heart. There is nothing you can do when only a few people show up. A successful craft fair depends on lots of people coming to snap up your crochet, and when those people don’t appear there is nothing you can do to sell more.
For more tips on how to make your craft fair day as profitable as possible, download my 39 tips to sell out your crochet here.
I’m Kelly Thomas, crochet business owner, pattern writer, blogger and coach. I started my crochet business selling what I make and made all the mistakes along the way. Let me show you what I learned so you don’t make the same errors.
You can listen to the podcast episode that goes with this article here. It is a bit different to what you’ve just read, but the message is the same.
You can check out the rest of my podcast here to discover more about how to turn your crochet into a successful business.
