How many pairs of earrings do you pack for a fair you have never done, at a booth nobody has ever walked past?
If that question has been bothering you for a week, it is not because you are bad at planning. Every inventory method you will find starts the same way: take last time's sales, adjust for this time. You do not have a last time. So you swing between two bad plans, bringing everything you own or bringing a cautious handful and hoping, and neither one feels like a decision.
The short version: you can build the missing number. Before the fair, count how many shoppers stop at a booth like yours and how many of them buy. Turn that count into three scenarios (low, middle, high). Split each scenario across your products. Pack to the high scenario for anything cheap, light and non-perishable, and to the middle for everything else. Then count what comes home, because that count is the sales history you did not have this time.
We will walk through it with June, a composite maker, not a real seller. June makes polymer clay earrings ($24), hand-stamped brass bookmarks ($12) and small framed prints ($65), and she has just been accepted to a one-day holiday fair that runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Every number below is a worked-example figure. Swap in your own.
Why the usual advice does not work the first time
Look closely at the standard stock-sizing advice and you will find a history number hiding in it. The farmers market version says track sales by item for four to six markets before trusting your demand range. The pop-up version starts from what you sell on a strong market day. Both are right, and both assume you have already done this at least once.
The advice that is left for first-timers tends to be a single rule, like "bring enough to fill the table" or "bring three times what you expect to sell." These rules sound specific, but they have no connection to your booth. Three times what? The part you are missing is what you expect to sell, and no multiplier can supply it.
Here is the good news. What you are really missing is an estimate of how many people will stop and how many will buy. You can observe other people's booths to get it, before your own booth exists.
Step 1: Get a stop count before the fair
A stop is a shopper who stops walking and looks at or touches something on the table. People who keep walking don't count. Neither does someone who glances at the table in passing. You are counting people who paused.
Find a fair before yours, ideally at the same venue or one of similar size, and pick a booth that resembles yours: similar products, similar prices. Stand across the aisle where you are not blocking anyone. Then, with a notebook or a hand tally counter, count for three 15-minute blocks spread across the day: one mid-morning, one around lunch, one in the late afternoon. For each block, write down:
- How many shoppers stopped.
- How many of them bought something.
- How many items each buyer walked away with, if you can see.
June did this at a spring fair in the same hall, watching a jewelry booth with a similar price range:
| Block | Stops | Sales | Items bought |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10:30–10:45 | 26 | 4 | 5 |
| 12:15–12:30 | 31 | 4 | 6 |
| 2:45–3:00 | 14 | 1 | 1 |
| Total (45 minutes) | 71 | 9 | 12 |
Three quarters of an hour of standing still, and she has three numbers nobody could have given her: about 95 stops an hour (71 ÷ 0.75), about 13% of stops buying (9 ÷ 71), and about 1.3 items per sale (12 ÷ 9).
Rule of thumb: spread your blocks across the day. The lunch rush and the 3 p.m. lull are both part of the day you will be selling through, and counting only one of them would skew the average.
If there is no fair to scout before yours, ask the organizer how many people came last year and how they counted them (ticket scans are firmer than an estimate), and ask a returning vendor how their day went. That is weaker evidence than your own count, so widen the gap between your low and high scenarios to match.
Step 2: Turn stops into three sales scenarios
The booth June watched is not her booth. That vendor had regulars stopping to say hello. June will have none of those, a display she has never set up under pressure, and a first-day nervousness customers can feel. So she keeps her scouting numbers as the high scenario and discounts from there:
- High: her booth does as well as the one she watched, at 95 stops an hour with 13% buying.
- Middle: three quarters of the stops (71 an hour), and 10% of them buying.
- Low: half the stops (48 an hour), and 7% of them buying.
To set your own discounts, count the things working against you compared with the booth you watched: no regulars, a new display, a worse spot in the hall, a product people have not seen before. June's middle scenario trims traffic by a quarter and the buy rate by about a quarter. Her low scenario halves traffic and roughly halves the buy rate. The more of those factors apply to you, the lower your middle scenario should sit.
The fair runs six hours. Here is the arithmetic, kept visible so you can redo it with your own numbers:
| Scenario | Stops per hour | Total stops (× 6) | Share who buy | Sales | Units (× 1.3) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| High | 95 | 570 | 13% | 74 | 96 |
| Middle | 71 | 426 | 10% | 43 | 56 |
| Low | 48 | 288 | 7% | 20 | 26 |
The spread between 26 and 96 units is large, and it should be. A first fair is genuinely uncertain, and a single confident number would hide that. The three scenarios make it something you can plan around. Any conversion rate you read online was measured at someone else's booth. Yours at least comes from a booth you watched with your own eyes, in a hall you will actually be standing in.
Step 3: Split the scenarios across your products
Units in total are not a packing list. June needs to know how many earrings, bookmarks and prints to bring, so she estimates her product mix. She has a few months of online orders to go on, and she watched what left the jewelry booth. Her best guess is that earrings will be 55% of the units she sells, bookmarks 35% and prints 10%. This is a guess and she treats it as one. The fair will correct it.
| Product | Share of units | Low | Middle | High |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Earrings ($24) | 55% | 14 | 31 | 53 |
| Bookmarks ($12) | 35% | 9 | 20 | 34 |
| Prints ($65) | 10% | 3 | 6 | 10 |
| Total | 100% | 26 | 57 | 97 |
(The middle and high totals come out one unit above Step 2 because each product is rounded separately. That is expected, and not worth fixing.)
Now she has a number for each product, and the next step is to choose which column to pack from.
Step 4: Pack to the high scenario, with one exception
It is easy to go wrong here in one of two directions: they pack cautiously to the middle and sell out by 1 p.m., or they bring everything and spend the afternoon rearranging a table nobody can shop.
For anything cheap, light and non-perishable, June packs the high column. Here is why, in her own numbers:
- If she packs the high column and the day turns out middle, the extra units come home. That is 23 more earrings than the middle scenario needs (she rounds 53 up to 54, three each of 18 designs) and 15 more bookmarks (she rounds 34 up to 35, five each of seven designs). At her material costs of $4.50 an earring pair and $2.20 a bookmark, that is $103.50 + $33.00 = $136.50 of stock riding home in a bin. None of it spoils. It goes back on her online shop or to the next fair.
- If she packs the middle column and the day turns out high, she is short of the high column's demand by 22 earrings (53 − 31) and 14 bookmarks (34 − 20). The rounding up in the first bullet is only how she packs, so the demand gap uses the Step 3 figures. At $24 and $12, that is 22 × $24 + 14 × $12 = $696 in sales she did not make.
In the first case she carries home $136.50 of stock that will still sell later. In the second she loses $696 of sales for good. For stock that keeps, the answer is to pack the high column.
The exception is anything bulky, expensive or perishable. June's prints are $16 each in materials, they are heavy, and a scuffed frame cannot be sold. For those she packs the middle column (six prints: three hanging, three in a flip bin) and puts a small card on the table: "Sold out? I'll ship it to you." An order card turns a sellout into a sale she can still make next week, and the card itself tells her demand went past six.
Food follows the same rule for a different reason. Leftover earrings go back in a bin, but leftover scones go stale, so a baker's cost of over-packing is the full ingredient cost. If you sell food, pack the middle column and plan in advance where leftovers go. The farmers market mistakes guide covers that leftover plan.
Two last checks before you commit:
- Does it fit? June's 95 units fit in two small bins and a flat portfolio. If the high column needs a third trip to the car, the high column is too big for your setup, whatever the math says.
- Can you make it in time? If making the 23 extra earrings would take hours you do not have before the fair, then your real limit is production time, not demand. Pack what you can make without burning out the week before.
Step 5: Count what comes home
This step decides whether your first fair produces a number you can use at the next one. It is also the easiest step to skip when you are exhausted at 4 p.m.
Before anything leaves the studio, write down the opening count by product. June's is 54 earrings, 35 bookmarks and 6 prints. During the day, keep a tally sheet with one tick per sale and the products in it, even a rough one.
If a friend is helping, ask them to repeat your Step 1 count from behind the table for two 15-minute blocks. That gives you your own stop count and buy rate, not a borrowed one. The Craft Show Prep and Profit Tracker has an in-show grid for exactly this, and it holds up better on a folding table than a phone does.
At the end of the day, count what is left. Sell-through is units sold divided by units brought. Here is June's day:
| Product | Brought | Came home | Sold | Sell-through |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Earrings | 54 | 24 | 30 | 56% |
| Bookmarks | 35 | 6 | 29 | 83% |
| Prints | 6 | 4 | 2 | 33% |
| Total | 95 | 34 | 61 | 64% |
Her tally sheet shows 44 sales, almost exactly her middle scenario of 43. The product mix was wrong in a useful way: bookmarks sold nearly as many units as earrings, and she had guessed they would sell only about two-thirds as many.
Now look at what packing the high column saved her. Suppose she had packed the middle column of 20 bookmarks. She sold 29 over six hours, a pace of about 4.8 an hour, so 20 would have run out a little after 2 p.m. Her notebook would then have said "bookmarks: 20, sold out," which means at least 20. She would have planned the next fair around 20 when the real number was 29. A product that sells out only tells you demand was at least what you brought.
If you sell out anyway: write down the time. Divide the units sold by the hours before the sellout, then multiply by the hours the fair ran. For June's hypothetical 20 bookmarks: 20 ÷ 4.1 hours × 6 hours ≈ 29. It is rough, because a fair's traffic is not flat, but it is a far better starting point than "sold out."
The recordkeeping is the part a spreadsheet makes hard, because the stock is now in two places and moving between them.
In Ardent Seller you can set the fair up as its own location, transfer the packed stock to it, and record the day's sales against that location. You can type them in, or photograph the paper tally sheet and let Snap-a-Sale draft the sale from it. Then transfer whatever comes home back to the studio. The fair's location then holds its own sell-through by product, ready for the next time you plan.
What changes at your second fair
June now has what she lacked a month ago: a real day, at her real booth. She made 44 sales and sold 61 units, about 1.4 units per sale, split as 30 earrings, 29 bookmarks and 2 prints.
From here, the history-based methods apply. For a multi-day event, the pop-up method in how to run a pop-up shop for a handmade business starts from exactly this "sales on a strong day" number. For deciding whether the next show is worth the booth fee at all, the break-even math in how to get into juried craft shows can now use her own stop count and buy rate in place of a borrowed one.
You do not need to get the first fair's number right. You need to leave with a number you can use at the second. If you only do one thing, count the stock before you pack it and again when you get home, product by product.
When you are ready to stop doing that count with a pencil, start free with Ardent Seller, set your first fair up as its own location, and let the next plan start from real sell-through instead of a guess.
Related reading
- How to Run a Pop-Up Shop for Makers — once you have one real sales day, this is how to size stock for a multi-day event, from opening count to teardown.
- Why Your Craft Fair Booth Isn't Making Money — the hour-by-hour post-mortem to run on the same day you count what came home, so the sell-through numbers come with a profit verdict.
- Juried Craft Show: Break-Even Math & Profit — how to get into juried craft shows, and how to use your own stop count to decide whether the next booth fee is worth paying.
- Multi-Location Inventory — multi-location inventory tracking for the moment your stock lives in the studio, a market bin and a consignment shelf at once.
- Farmers Market Mistakes — the farmers market vendor mistakes that cost money, including the leftover plan food sellers need before they pack.
Free resources
Two free downloads for the week before your first fair:
- Craft Show Prep and Profit Tracker — the packing checklist covers load-in, and the in-show grid records sales, top sellers by units and a conversion estimate, which Step 5 turns into sell-through.
- Craft Seller Startup Checklist — the setup items a first fair tends to expose, including a pricing method, reorder points for your supplies, and the sales tax permit and licenses a public event can require.
This article is provided for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, tax, or business advice. Sales scenarios, conversion rates, product mixes, and cost figures are illustrative and will vary by your specific circumstances. Consult a qualified accountant or small-business advisor before making financial decisions based on this content.