So, doing a market for the first time- last time I participated in one was as a young teen helping my mom. That has been a number of years. The market is the first weekend of December for about 5 hours. I know i have time to work on things, but was trying to figure out what is a good number of items to have? Also, how does everyone determine/ figure out pricing? Never been good at telling someone a money amount for things. Also, any suggestions on table setup/ display?
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I would like to start by saying that what works for me may not work for everyone. Everyone does things differently because everyone has a different audience. You have to keep in mind what type of people your customers might be. For example if your market is in an area that’s more high class you can most likely expect more people to buy more things and pay more for those things than they would if the market is in a more middle or lower class area. The customers at the markets I usually attend don’t usually want to spend more than around £10-15, but this is something I caught on to after a few markets. I’ll share what works for me and hope it helps.
So when it comes to setting up my table, I do have 2 shelves that I set up and 2 spinning jewelry stands. I use the jewelry stands for keychains and the shelves just to help separate things into sections. I like to keep the same priced items together. Most of my items are £5 but I also have a few £8 and £10 items. I’ll put all the £8 on one shelf and put a £8 price marker in front of the shelf and I’ll do the same with the £10 on the other shelf. Since most of my items are £5 those are the ones i will just have placed nice and neat in one area of the table. I didn’t have shelves until a couple of months ago so if you don’t have any to use it’ll be perfectly fine. It does really help with keeping things organized though. But making sure things are organized by price in your display is very important. It not only makes it easier on you to keep track of things, but it helpsthe customer clearly see what the prices are for everything without having to put a price tag on each individual item.
When it cones to pricing, it’s really however you want to do it. A lot of people will do ALL the math and figure out hour much they want to pay themselves by the hour, multiply that by how long it took them to make the item, then factor in the cost of materials. I personally don’t go through all that trouble. I just try to put myself in the customers shoes and think of how much I would pay for it. For me, most of my items are £5. It’s a nice low price that most customers would pay. These are for smaller items like leggy frogs, bees, baby mushrooms, things that might take me an hour or less to make and don’t use too many materials. Larger items that took a while to make and used lots of materials will obviously need a higher price tag, but this is where I personally feel like calculating the cost by paying yourself by the hour is unrealistic. Recently I made a dragon that took me almost 3 weeks to make. If I priced things based on how long it took me to make it, the price of it would’ve been outrageous. It sold for £40. My keychains sell pretty well at £3 and I’m happy with that price. Like I said in the beginning, what works for me may not work for you, but I’m happy with my prices. I may be selling myself short sometimes, but I’m the type of person that would rather sell more items for a little less than I would really like, rather than put a higher price on it and not sell anything at all. Oh! And if it’s something specific, like pokemon for example, people will definitely pay a little more for them than just like a random bear or something of similar size.
Now for the number of items. It really depends on what you’re making. It’s always good to have a variety of different items, and in some cases the same item in different colors as well. It also depends on the price of the item. In my experience it’s better to have a lot of the smaller items and only 1 or 2 of larger items. An example for me would be my £5 leggy frogs. These are really popular at my markets so I like to have 6 or 7 green frogs but then I’ll have 1 or 2 of each color of the rainbow as well. I usually try to have at least 5 or 6 of each £5 item because those are the things people are most likely to buy from me. For anything I’ll be selling for more than £10 I’ll only have 1 or 2 of each item because less people are likely to pay for it.
Like i said at the beginning, what works for me may not work for you. But this is just what I’ve learned from my experiences. I don’t know if i helped at all, but i hope you have a good market!
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