How do you prepare for a large venue market for the first time?

[Adontelina]

I have a market in early March,  the biggest i have ever attended with my crafts.   I am also currently expanding my product base, revamping my website, and launching a YouTube channel.  Ugh fun! Lol. 

The real question is how to gage how much product I need on hand and should I bother with custom order forms?

[maxpete]

Congrats on your upcoming market, that is so exciting! 

Tagging in some folks in the Community to potentially weigh in with their insights! @HC_Charlie, @SakredJoiArt, @GeekInStitches, and @VanKalkerFarms 

I also wanted to link to a previous discussion around markets in case it inspires some ideas! https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/Artists-and-Makers/Let-s-talk-farmers-markets/m-p/725935

[Adontelina]

Thanks so much!

[HC_Charlie]

Hello @Adontelina thanks for your post. Your event sounds exciting! It is always a challenge to try to gauge event attendance. Here are a few things I've done in the best to help me be prepared:

• Can you ask the event organizers (if this is an event held before) what the historical attendance numbers are? This could help with your inventory estimates.
• Do you have historical data from past shows you've shown at? If so you could try and extrapolate. Lets say you made 50 sales for an event attendance of 500 people. You could then guess (and I do stress GUESS, because it's always not quite predicable) that if 1,000 people may attend the event, you may make 100 sales.

Really the best advice I can offer is to try to be as prepared as you can be, and try to remain flexible. Make as many items as you can, and if you have extras you'll be stocked for future events or online sales. And also reserve items as "samples" so if you do run out, you could show a display and offer to fulfill orders. So YES if you do custom work, or made-to-order items, I'd have a way for customers to place an order with you.

Also have signage and business cards with your website and ordering info listed. A few other tips...have slips or a way for customers to signup for your mailing list with their email. You could also have a raffle item and use that to collect emails (but check with event organizers and local/state agencies because sometimes raffles are regulated based on where you live.) And be sure you be clear in your email collection form that the customer is giving permission for you to email them (just to cover your bases with legal issues in spam and emailing.) Use in-person events to collect as much info and data as you can !!!!!! this is super important for marketing later. You can use Square Marketing and Loyalty to reach past and potential customers, but if you don't have customer emails, it makes it more difficult.

And track your inventory and item sales. Often creatives tend to shy away from doing things like spreadsheets, but these can be your friends in figuring out what your best sellers are and what market events work best for you. Good luck to you and please let us know how your event turns out! I'm excited for you!!

[Adontelina]

Thanks so much! I will definitely set up and email sign up list and reserve sample items.  I'm not sure why I never thought of it.  

Thanks again. 

[Tom]

Stoked for you, @Adontelina — sounds like an exciting (and busy!) time with all those projects in motion. 💪 Great points from @HC_Charlie and @maxpete as well! 💯

When it comes to preparing for the venue itself, you might find even more inspiration in this thread: Share a pic of your booth set up!

It’s got a bunch of photos and advice from fellow community members who’ve been in your shoes. Also, @rtfulk has a ton of experience with fairs and markets — tagging 'em in in case there are more tips & tricks to add here.

Wishing you a smooth prep and a successful event. ⭐️

[Adontelina]

Thanks so much.  I will check it out

[rtfulk]

@Tom Thank You.   @Adontelina It’s a double edge sword. You have x amount of time to sell and you try to bring x amount of product. If you sell out you kick yourself for losing sales, if you order too heavy you kick yourself self for having too much inventory. All I can say is it takes time to learn and that still doesn’t work. We’ve been in selling mobile for 36 years and sometimes we still get it wrong.  

I saw where you wrote you are revamping your website and YouTube channel. I want to add a little more work on you. Build a landing page with a QR code to it. That is the best thing we have done. On our page we have a little information section at the top, we have all our social media links, all the ways you can contact us. a link to sign up for our loyalty page, website, facebook page…etc we have about a 76% click through rate on our landing page .  I also have a link in there that the customer can save our contact info to their contacts. We encourage customers to do that for one main reason. When they save us to their contacts, after that none of our emails will go to the spam folder because our email address is saved by them on their devices.

Below is a link to our landing page.

Korie’s Kloset Landing page