Free tool
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 tool, no sign up
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.
Restock plans fail on arithmetic, not on effort. A maker comes home from a strong Sunday with the display half empty, looks at the calendar, sees three weeks until the next market, and decides that is plenty. Three weeks is twenty one days, but the bench gets nine hours a week after the day job, the school run, the online orders and the two evenings that always disappear.
This calculator turns that hopeful feeling into a number of finished pieces. It takes the target you want on the grid wall, subtracts what is already boxed, converts the gap into bench hours at your real pace, then measures those hours against the time the calendar honestly holds once packing and pricing are taken out.
Your result
Units you still have to make
144
The gap between a full booth and what is already boxed and ready.
Bench hours that gap needs
33.6
Your own pace applied to every piece the display is short.
Bench hours the calendar holds
24.0
Weekly bench time before load in, minus packing and pricing work.
Units you will have at load in
198
What the booth realistically holds if the weeks go the way they usually do.
If the load in figure sits well under your target, cut a line rather than thinning every line across the whole display.
The minutes per piece nobody measures
Ask a maker how long a pair of earrings takes and you will hear the making time. The bench does not agree. The real figure includes the finishing pass, the photograph if the piece also goes online, the tag, the card, the poly bag and putting it in the right tote in the right order for load in. For small work that back half is often as long as the making.
Time a batch once with a timer running from raw stock to a piece in the tote, then divide by the number you finished. Use that figure here. Makers who do this almost always find the honest number is a third higher than the one in their head, which is precisely why three weeks keeps turning out not to be plenty.
What to do when the numbers do not reach
A shortfall is useful information three weeks out and useless the night before. If the calculator lands you short, you have four real moves: drop a line from the display, raise prices on the lines that emptied first at the last show, build a batch of a simpler piece, or accept a lighter booth and merchandise for depth instead of breadth.
The move to avoid is thinning every line by a few units. A grid wall with a shallow spread of everything looks picked over by Saturday afternoon, and shoppers read it as leftovers. Two lines shown deep and full sell better than six lines shown thin, and the per show counts from your last market will tell you which two those should be.
Questions about this calculator
What target should I set for a two day outdoor market?
Work back from your best comparable show. Take the units you sold there, add enough to keep the display full through Sunday afternoon, and treat that as your target. Booths that empty by Saturday evening lose the second day, so the target is always higher than expected sales.
My lines take very different times to make. What do I enter?
Use a weighted average for the mix you actually plan to carry. If one line dominates the display, its pace should dominate the number. For a split load, run the calculator twice with each line's own minutes and target, then add the hours together.
How does this connect to per show counts?
The target comes straight out of your last show at that venue. Once you have opening and closing counts for a fair, you know which lines emptied and which came home untouched, and the restock target stops being a guess about the whole booth.
More free tools and working documents
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.
Put this number next to the show it came from
The result you just worked out means more sitting beside what that fair really rang up. Bring it to a short demo and we will place it against the opening and closing counts from a comparable market. Within a few minutes you will know whether your estimate matched the aisle or flattered it.