My craft stall

[marshlander]

Just got around to downloading the pics from my camera - had my 1st craft stall last month. Didn't make much after covering the cost of the pitch. Really must try etsy etc.

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set= ... 7457afa0bf

[Green Aura]

Looks lovely. It's so hard to make money at these fairs. I did them for a year and never really covered more than my expenses.

Let us know how it goes with Etsy - I need to have a look at it myself.

[Thomzo]

Looks a lovely stall. I do craft fairs from time to time and agree that you don't seem to make much money. I thought it was just that I don't make things that other people like.

Zoe

[MuddyWitch]

The stall looked so tempting, shame you didn't sell much. Better luck on Etsy.

MW

[Lost-in-the-Day]

You have some lovely stuff there! I've never tried selling at a craft fair before but at a lot of the craft fairs I go to I see most stall holders go home with just as much stuff as they came with.

As well as Ebay/Etsy/Folksy etc it might be worth creating an account on a site like DeviantArt. It's designed for sharing arts & crafts rather than selling, but a lot of people do sell their stuff on there and advertise for commission work. There are no charges for displaying your work on the site and no commission charges for selling. (Unless you want to sell prints of your work, in which case they do all that for you and you get a 20% royalty fee and they do the printing and the shipping etc.) You might not get any business, but you won't lose anything to listing fees either.

[GeorgeSalt]

You have some lovely stuff there! I've never tried selling at a craft fair before but at a lot of the craft fairs I go to I see most stall holders go home with just as much stuff as they came with.

I checked out some local craft sales with a view to selling photographic greeting cards. It was very clear that the stallholders fell into a couple of categories - those that tried to sell what they could make, and those that tried to make what they could sell. I saw far too many in the first category, it's a bit like Etsy but without the long-tail market.

[marshlander]

Hmmm. I tried to sell what I can make - not the best plan then........

What's a long tail market?

[yvette]

Your stall looked lovely, as did your items for sale.
I do pop-up shops and the odd craft stall too, and rarely make much, but I try to look on it as an investment in that I give out lots of cards and flyers about where I'll be selling next. I am still in the process of setting up a web shop, but I do find that often people email me and we arrange sales that way, so stalls do generate sales but sometimes in the long term rather than the short term. And its taken quite a long time to start to see a return on all those stalls....
So don't be discouraged.

[GeorgeSalt]

Hmmm. I tried to sell what I can make - not the best plan then........

It depends.. and I don't know what you make. Somethings seem to sell everywhere whilst others have more limited markets. The stalls I've seen that tend to to best at local craft markets are those that are quite modern in their designs and that people think they would struggle to make themselves (handmade jewellery seems to do quite well and with a decent margin on materials).

What's a long tail market?

It's explained on Wiki (link) but perhaps not very well.

I'll pinch their diagram and try to explain it myself..



The vertical scale is the numbers of goods sold, the horizontal scale is made up of the categories of goods sold. Somewhere to the left is chocolate, tea, coffee, etc - things that are sold in large numbers. As you move right you get walkmans, televisions, cars, etc - thing that are sold in lower numbers. And then you get a lot of types of product individually sold in very low numbers.

The problem with a lot of niche craft products (crochet egg cosies, macrame gimp masks, etc) is that they are low demand items wa-ay off to the right in the long tail of the graph. The buyers of these items are few and far between, with perhaps one or two within range of any one craft fair. If your product is one of these you will struggle to recover the costs of sale unless you can charge a very high margin. The advantage of Etsy/Amazon/Ebay is that your market place becomes huge, and the bigger the audience the larger the number of potential long-tail buyers you're presenting your products to. And even better, they can actively search for the products they want and find yours.