First Craft Fair Stall: How Much Stock, What Float?

2026-10-25

Friday, 3:15 pm, the hallway full of boxes

The confirmation email says pitch 14, set-up from 7:30, tables provided. That's all it says.

You are sitting on the hallway floor with a box of ceramic mugs on one side and a shoebox of candles on the other. Your phone is open on a search you've now typed three different ways: how much stock to bring to a craft fair.

The answers are all confident and none of them are about you. Bring more than you think. Bring less than you think. Bring a float of fifty. Bring a float of two hundred.

You look at the mugs. Forty? Sixty? What if you sell out by eleven and stand there with an empty table? What if you sell four and drive home with a van full of your own savings?

And then there's the float, which has been sitting in your stomach since Tuesday.

The question nobody puts on the stall sign

The float feels like a small thing. It isn't. It's the first moment a stranger hands you a twenty for a six-pound candle and you have to look calm while you count change from a biscuit tin.

You imagine it clearly. A queue of three people. A coin pouch that's suddenly short of fivers. Your hands doing slow maths while somebody says, "No rush," in the tone that means there is a rush.

Under that sits the bigger worry, the one you don't say to your friends who keep texting so excited for you!!

You don't actually know what a mug costs you.

You know what the clay cost. You know roughly what the stall fee was. But the glaze, the kiln time, the packaging, the petrol, the Saturday itself, the two weekends you spent making all this? Somewhere in there is your own time, and so far you've priced it at nothing.

So "how much stock" isn't really a stock question. It's: if I sell all of this, will I have made anything? And if I sell half, will I have lost something?

What you do instead of deciding

You do what everyone does. You write a number on the back of an envelope. Then another. You cross out the first one. You add a note that says bring extra bags?? and underline it twice.

You pack the way you'd pack for a holiday you aren't sure about: a bit of everything, in case.

By 9 pm the van is loaded and you still can't answer the question. You're just hoping.

Hoping isn't a plan, and it's expensive. It's the extra thirty candles you'll lug home. It's the cash you'll realise on Sunday you can't match to anything. It's the price you'll quietly lower at 2 pm because a woman looked at the mugs twice and walked on.

The turning point is smaller than you'd think

Now imagine a different Friday.

Same hallway, same boxes. But on the laptop there's one calm page for the stall. Each product has a line: what it costs to make, what you'd like to earn on it, where it sits against fees and your own hours. Not a guess, just a number you can see.

Next to it, a column for how many you're bringing and how many you'd need to sell to make the day worth it. Suddenly forty mugs isn't a feeling. It's a sensible number, or it isn't, and you can change it in a minute.

The float stops being a dread and becomes a short list. This many fivers, this many pound coins, this much in tens. Written down, packed in a labelled pouch, done.

Nothing about the day becomes certain. Crafts fairs are not certain. But the questions that kept you on the hallway floor now have somewhere to live that isn't your head.

Saturday, 4:30 pm, packing down

Here's the after.

The hall is emptying. Someone nearby is folding a tablecloth. Your feet ache in the good way.

You've sold what you've sold. Some mugs are left, which is fine, because you knew roughly what that would mean. The float pouch is zipped up. You tick off what went, make a note of the candle that people kept picking up, and write down that the small prints went faster than you'd guessed.

On Sunday you'll sit with a coffee and enter the day. Takings, stock left, what the cash should be. It'll take ten minutes, not an evening. The numbers will agree with each other, and if they don't, you'll see exactly where.

And the next fair, you won't stand in the hallway guessing. You'll have last time to look at.

That's the quiet thing worth wanting: not a perfect first stall, just one you can learn from without a knot in your stomach.

If you recognised the hallway

If this is you, boxes by the door and a float question you can't shake, there's a simple place to put it all. Market Day Calm – Stall Stock, Sales & Float Tracker is an Excel tracker for makers: real profit per product after fees and your time, your market-day float, stock levels and custom quotes. It comes with a 30-day money-back promise, so if it doesn't help, you get a full refund, no questions.

Have a look at Market Day Calm

It doesn't replace a tax professional, and it won't predict your Saturday. It just means that when you stand behind your table, you already know your numbers.

An illustrative story, written with AI assistance.