Question: How many pieces of jewelry do I need for my booth in a craft show? Do you make one of something to see how it goes, or do you make 50 and hope to sell them all? I know you take your target market into consideration, however, I am confused as to the amount of each piece to keep in my inventory.
Answer: This excerpt from my ebook, Ultimate Guide to Your Profitable Jewelry Booth, should answer your question:
Your first few shows are learning experiences.
Although you may or may not make a lot of sales while your jewelry business is in its beginning stages, approach your first shows as an opportunity to learn everything you can – for example:
- what your potential customers are looking for (in both jewelry styles and price points)
- what kind of shows are most successful for you
- how to evolve successful displays, booth design, packaging, and transaction systems.
At your first show, keep track of what sells well, what people are interested in, what they ask for, whom they buy for, and how much they’re willing to spend.
To make the most jewelry sales, you’ll need to be aware of what your market demands – and to be on the lookout for styles that can become profitable “bread-and-butter” items for you.
You don’t want your display to appear sparse, so you do need to have enough pieces to fill out your table or booth.
Once you know the size of your allotted space, you can play with your display and determine how much jewelry you need.
For your first shows, I recommend having a variety of pieces in a variety of price ranges to test your market.
Be sure your mid-priced and higher-priced pieces represent some of your very best work. And don’t forget to include a selection of under-$20 items that make great impulse purchases.
Although selling these lower-priced items may not be the reason you started your jewelry business, they can turn out to be profitably hot sellers and a welcome addition to the rest of your line.
While you’re testing your market, I highly recommend that you don’t make too many pieces in any particular design until you find out what sells well for you.
When my jewelry business was in its beginning stages, I created a necklace design that I was sure would be a big hit – and I spent a lot of time making several dozen of them.
However, after several shows, I wound up cutting these necklaces apart to re-use the beads and clasps in other projects.
I had sold only one of them, to a neighbor who I’m sure was just being kind!
I wished I had tested my market with just a few necklaces first.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Rena, There was a time when I did an extensive research on this topic before a craft show. Including your web site and some others in this line and a couple of books I came to a formula. It is like this:
If I pay $50 for booth price, I expect to sell at least $500 worth of stuff. In order to sell that much I need to bring about three times this amount of stuff, which means I should take about $1500 dollars of inventory. In reality I took much more than that about $3000 and sold less than $1500!
But we are going through a learning curve and I think my mistake was having too much high priced ones and not enough lower range ones.
friend of mine said we must have about 100 pieces of earrings with $20 av, 30 bracelets $30 av, 20 necklaces $50 av.
Again my necklaces were higher than that and it did not quite match this rigid formula. But what do you think about this?
Hi Dita,
In my experience it varies so much from one event to another.
Even doing the same show two years in a row, you can have very different results as far as what people buy, how much they spend, what price ranges they’re seeking, and how much inventory you sell.
For me, I find that planning jewelry items and quantities for specific events doesn’t work very well – I simply can’t predict what people will buy.
So I focus on developing the lines of jewelry that tend to sell well for me, and making sure I have plenty of stock of those items on hand at all times. Then I’m always ready to show my jewelry, even at last-minute opportunities.
Also it’s a good idea to bring some of your new designs that you’re thinking of making a lot of. That way you can test the market’s response to them, and even ask people what they like / dislike about these new items.