In my last post I talked about how I knew this last market I participated in would be AMAZING.
Now let's talk some numbers and how I prepared!
I said in my last post that my goal was about 5.5x the cost of the market. Here's how I landed on that number.
- The cost of the market! It's gotta get covered. This includes any promotional materials, displays I would need to buy for this, etc.
- I took the hours I'd be there and imagined I'd need to pay someone (me) $15/hour to be there. I know it's controversial to think about your time like this, but hear me out: if I wasn't at the market, I'd have been at home working. That work would have brought in money from sales. At bare minimum, if I needed someone to come and cover time at the market (the thing I can outsource), it would cost me $15/hour. At a minimum.
- Finally, I took into account the cost of double the inventory I'd need to sell to cover the first two costs. I opt to consider double because people like options and an empty table looks terrible (in my opinion).
Because I'm me (overachieving, millennial eldest daughter), I actually ended up bringing DOUBLE what my goal was to sell. Again, I figured, best case I'd hit my magic number, be super happy, and still have enough to pop on my website for sales after.
That plan basically got shot to shit the first night when I made over HALF my total goal in 4 hours. And then I did the same thing on day 2. By the time day 3 came around I could have sold one thing and I would have been happy. Instead I had a better single day than the entire month of September 2023. And then I did it again on the 4th day.
To put this market into perspective: I sold more in 4 days (Tuesday-Friday) than I did the entire month of December 2023.
Next week I'm going to go over specific things I brought that really pushed my sales over the edge and how I handled it when I ran out of my most popular items.