When you first get started, there’s a temptation to place pieces in your booth that aren’t for sale. Beautiful and functional pieces can be hard to find and if you sell your bookshelf or table, where do you put all the smalls or your stacked pieces? I understand all the arguments as to why booth owners and even market vendors do this, but please keep this in mind if you’re thinking about placing items in your booth that are not for sale.
You simply can’t afford to give up the square footage to an item that is never going to produce income. Let me explain. Each month you should have a profit goal. To establish that goal, you must first determine your costs. That includes; booth rent/commission, inventory purchases, labor/materials for fixing/cleaning/creating inventory and marketing costs. All of these items are combined to help you determine the cost of goods sold. Then you must calculate how much inventory you will need to sell each month to make a profit.
Calculating the amount of inventory to keep in your space in order to make a profit is something you’ll figure out over time. But it is always a good exercise to keep a running total of the RETAIL value of your inventory that is in your booth in order to determine your potential profitability. I would tell my vendors that you should keep a retail total of 10-20 times their booth rent in their space.
Ninety-nine percent of you are not going to sell out your booth inventory each month. A really good seller may turn 30% to 50% of their inventory in a single month. Thus you need to fully maximize your space to put inventory that has the potential to sell. Booth owners simply can’t afford to give up valuable real estate for non-income producing pieces.
I think there are a few exceptions to this though.
– For those of you that carry a product line that has lots of products and is a major income producer for you, then not selling your shelving makes sense.
-If the items you sell are all or mostly small like specialty jewelry, accessories, clothing, candles or smalls that account for the majority of your income, then keeping your shelving also may be the right choice.
-If you are keeping pieces because they are cool or you think you need bookshelves to sell lots of smalls, then your ratio of large to medium to small items is probably out of balance.
Every item in your booth should have a potential to make you money except when it comes to the exceptions I just listed.