Quick Tips – Planning Your Sales
Welcome to this week’s blog. Let’s jump right into this week’s focus: planning your craft fair sales.
As many of you know, I spent over 25 years in retail. One of the best things I learned was to plan and anticipate your sales. This is important because you’ll be able to track how you’re doing against your sales goal throughout the craft fair. Having this knowledge and visibility allows you to make adjustments as needed and feel a sense of control and empowerment throughout the event.
It’s important to manage your expectations around sales, especially if this is your first craft fair. Having a game plan in advance will help in the ways I outline below.
My three tips for you this week are:
#1 – Track the days and hours of the fair.
Craft fairs usually happen over a certain number of days with specific hours each day. I recommend that you create a sales plan for each day - and each hour if you’re up for that. These will be guesstimates but it’s helpful to have an initial plan.
Breaking down your sales goals by hour may seem like overkill - but it’s not. Open up a spreadsheet (e.g., in Google Sheets), or download the one I’ve created for you HERE. Fill in the details for your products and then add a section where you’ll list each day of the fair and the hours you’ll be there selling.
#2 – List your products costs and selling prices.
Pricing and pricing methodology is a whole separate topic. However, a very rough industry standard is to double the price that it cost you to acquire the product. For example, if it cost you $10 to acquire a product, you want to sell it for $20.
This pricing approach won’t work in all cases. For example, if you’re buying some of your own products when they are on sale on Society6, you’ll want to resell them at full price. That’s likely to be about 25-30% more than the price you paid - not double. The price always needs to be reasonable and not something that’s inflated above what’s normal.
What’s essential is that you have your list of products and prices so that you can keep track of everything. You’ll do an after market review - a quick analysis of what sold best and what you can improve the next time. We’ll cover this in more detail in a future blog.
#3 – Guesstimates are okay.
As you think about the days of the craft fair, and the opening hours, think about when it might be busiest. Set sales goals that are higher when it will be busy and lower when it might be a bit slow.
Use your judgement and knowledge as a shopper yourself to guess when it’s going to be busy and when things might start to wind down each day. Having this awareness will help you a ton during the event itself and provides you with a good basis upon which to set your hourly sales goals.
At the end of the day, you want to have fun and not stress out too much about how sales are going. Having a rough plan will, however, help you adjust in the moment. If sales are slowing down, you can create a new “multi-pack” or “bundle” like we talked about several weeks ago. All of this pre-planning will help you maximize sales and enjoy the event too.
Next week, we’ll talk about how to market your shop to build awareness and excitement about your offerings.
Pop over to my YouTube channel to watch the video version of this blog. Click HERE and please subscribe while you’re over there.
Downloaded my free Craft Fair Guide for additional details. Bye for now. I’ll see you next week.
xo,
Anne
Explore Surface Pattern Design by downloading my free ebook HERE.
Have fun and I’ll see you next week.
Remember,
It’s Never Too Late to Create®
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MEET ANNE
Hi…I’m Anne!
My creative inspiration comes from a lifetime of observation. I grew up in Paris on the Place St. Sulpice and walked to school through the Luxembourg gardens. And that was only the beginning… Learn more by watching the video on my About page.
