Calculator
What a Craft Fair Booth Has to Sell to Break Even
Enter the booth fee, your travel and help for the weekend, your average sale and the share of each price that goes to materials and card fees, and see the number the show has to clear.
Free tools
Calculators for makers who sell from a ten by ten booth
One calculator prices the weekend before you send the application, the other tells you whether three weeks at the bench can fill the booth you plan to set up.
A booth weekend has two hard numbers, and neither of them is the booth fee. The first is what you have to ring up before the jury fee, the site fee, the gas, the hotel and the helper are all paid back. The second is whether you can physically make enough work to fill the tent by load in. Both calculators here use figures a maker already has: what a show costs, what your average sale is, and how many minutes a piece takes at the bench.
Nothing is stored and nothing is emailed unless you ask for it. Put in your own numbers, read the answer, then use it in the two decisions it was built for: whether to send the application for that large juried festival, and whether to cut the target inventory before you promise yourself a full grid wall.
Calculator
Can You Actually Make Enough Before the Next Show
Put in your target booth inventory, what is left in the totes, your minutes per piece and the bench hours you truly have each week, and see where you will land at load in.
Working document
The post show sheet that turns a weekend into a decision
Four short stages you fill in at teardown, in the van and on Monday, ending with a restock list and a written verdict on whether that fair earns your application again.
Why the booth math is open with no sign up
Every figure on this page is arithmetic a maker is already doing by hand, usually in a notebook at the kitchen table with an application deadline two days away. Booth fee plus jury fee, plus a tank and a half of gas for a show three hours out, plus the motel because load in is at six, then divided by a thirty eight dollar average ticket to see how many shoppers have to stop at the table. Or the other one: two hundred and forty units for a full grid wall, ninety six still in the totes from the last market, fourteen minutes a piece, three weeks of evenings. That math should not cost anybody an email address.
So neither calculator asks for an account, and both are worth the ten minutes whether or not you ever open BoothInventory. A break even figure gives you a buyer count you can hold against what that aisle actually gave you last season, which is a far better basis for sending a jury application than whether you enjoyed the weather. A bench hours figure tells you three weeks out, rather than the night before load in, that the display will come up short and a line needs cutting. Run them, write the answers on the show file, close the tab. The numbers are yours either way.
The figure is half of it, the season is the rest
A break even number and an honest bench hour count are worth having, and they still leave you retyping clipboard figures on Tuesday morning. BoothInventory keeps those numbers attached to the named show they came from, with the mileage, the helper pay and the closing counts in the same row. Book a demo and we will load one of your fairs so you can watch a season table build.