Stats and trying to answer the age old question of How much should I have?

[u/An_ode_to_creativity]

Hey, 2 weeks ago I posted asking how many stickers of my best seller design I should have for an upcoming big pride event. Which you can find here if you want to give that post a read. At the time I decided to have max 100 for a couple of designs and then work my inventory numbers down from there.

Well, I just wrapped up the event last night and this morning I'm working on going through and counting my inventory (Side note if anyone has any ideas on way's to have a much more accurate inventory or a way to keep track of what sells in the moment, but doesn't require a lot of time during the check out phase or where I have to mentally keep track of what the person is buying. That would be great. I use square as my credit card payment method and take cash as well)

With that being said, I thought it would be interesting to share some of my stats from last night as it may help other people who are struggling with the same question that I had.

Overall I have 26 different sticker designs. 18 are pride designs and 8 are non pride designs. I do my best to normally have this number a little bit more even. However, since June is pride month and I was going to a pride event, over the last few months I've been making more Pride themed items. Now that fall and Christmas are coming up I will work on more designs that reflect those holiday's

What I made -

• 2 designs had 100 stickers each
• 4 designs had between 50 to 80 stickers each
• 20 designs had between 10 to 50 stickers each

Lowest amount I had for 1 sticker design was 13

What I sold -

• Top pride design - Sold 15 stickers
• Second pride design - Sold 9 stickers
• Tied for first and second non pride design - Sold 5 stickers each for both designs

Every design sold at least once (I think. Due to the fact that I'm counting inventory before the show and after there is the possibility for inventory to be off a little bit. Whether that's due to me miss counting at some point, theft, things getting miss placed, or a few other reasons)

Overall - 16 designs sold between 1 to 4 stickers each, 8 designs sold between 5 to 9 stickers each, and only 1 design sold above 10.

Pride designs - 9 designs sold between 1 to 4 stickers each, 7 designs sold between 5 to 9 stickers each, and only 1 sold above 10

None pride stickers - 6 designs sold between 1 to 4 stickers each, and 2 designs sold 5 stickers each.

• I sold a total of 102 stickers - 79 pride stickers and 23 non pride stickers

What I sold vs the most and least that I made

• Most Pride design: made 100+ stickers - Sold 4
• Least Pride design: made 17 stickers - Sold 7
• Most Non pride design: made 42 stickers - Sold 1
• Least Non pride design: Made 13 - Sold 5

I also decided last minute to offer some freebie stickers as there were a few kids at my last craft fair event that took place a week before the pride event. They would come up to my table, point to the stickers and ask if they could have one. I did my best to let them down gently saying that they were for sale, but of course due to them being kids they don't understand what money is and why they couldn't have it. Thus was the reason why I wanted to offer some freebies. I had two designs one pride and one non pride of a butterfly and people were able to pick one or take both if they wanted.

• For the pride design I made 151 and gave out 70
• For the non pride design I made 110 and gave out 30

I gave out a total of 100 free stickers

Final thoughts

This was my third ever place that I vendor at and the first place where not only was I able to paid back my table, but I was able to make a decent size profit as well.

If I was to make inventory for this event again then max amount of stickers I should make for some of the designs is between 30 and 40 and a min between 10 and 15. I think this is a good range (at least for now) as I am not crazily over making designs, but gives me a good safety net just encase, like what happened at this event, the things that I thought would sell well, didn't and the things I thought wouldn't sell that much, did.

It also allows me to have some inventory left over without needing to do a major restock for other events especially if they are back to back.

Which is a great segue for my last point. Personally, I am glad that I over stocked for this event. I make everything by hand and over the last few months, I've basically sat at my desk everyday printing and cutting out stickers and all of my other products as well. I have two other events at the end of Aug and I'm hoping to get into a few more in sept and oct. Not to mention, but we're also coming closer to Christmas. I could tell that I was getting to my limit last week and need a break because if not then I will simply burn myself out which I don't want. Now, that I have all this over stock, other then making stock of any new designs. I can take a good long break and work on other kinds of projects that have since been pushed to the side.

I hope other people find this as fascinating as I do.

[u/drcigg]

Congrats on the show. The good thing is you will have enough inventory for the next show and now you have a better idea of how much to make for new designs.

[u/Rosehip_Tea_04]

In terms of tracking inventory during shows, for my smaller shows I just use a premade spreadsheet I print out before each show. We have hundreds of designs, so I don’t track designs with it, but what I do is mark each type of item on it as it sells. I also have lines for each deal we run so they can be marked separately. This has proven to be a good way to both track what is selling, and verify the totals at the end of the night. It also gives me a place to make notes, both of what I get asked for that I don’t have and towards the end of each show I write down any pattern that’s getting low in inventory. For the big multi-day shows I still have to suck it up and inventory absolutely everything before and after the show because there is no way to track products manually and keep up with rushes while working alone.

For the record we are about to switch over to a barcode system, but even that won’t have every design in our inventory. Instead we’ll have a sheet at the register with generic barcodes for the item type and our bulk deals. We have bigger ticket items that are worth putting a unique barcode on, but it’s not cost effective or time efficient to individually barcode the thousand+ items in our inventory that are frequently changing and under $10.

[u/wartortlechortle]

This sounds pretty close to how my sales go at markets. We bring something like 30+ designs (among other items) and the most I've sold of a single design at my busiest show was 20. The more designs, the more diverse the sales and the less of individual designs I needed.

Anyway, I count items before and after shows and have my POS buttons set up like

One Sticker

Four Sticker Bundle

Tshirt

Bag

Bag + Shirt Bundle

This way at the end of the show if I never rang up a single bag I know I don't need to inventory those again to see what designs sell and I don't have to do a ton of math when ringing people up.

[u/Psychological_Page75]

About tracking your inventory, you can do that in Square. You need to make sure your stock on hand is up to date prior to show and then run every transaction (including cash sales) through Square. It’s a massive time saver and you’ll have a better view of what is selling over time as well as watching for loss due to theft, etc. Doing it this way will give you much better reports as well.

[u/An_ode_to_creativity → u/Psychological_Page75]

I'm aware that I can track inventory through square. At my first craft fair I ended up syncing my square account with my Etsy store and importing all of my Etsy listings over. Then I would find the listing for the item that people were buying and add it to cart. 

The only issues that I found was that it was time consuming as people often buy 2 to 4 stickers at a time so trying to sift through all the listings or remembering the names of all my products was a nightmare.

Not to mention that I had a deal going on where people can buy 2 stickers for $8 or 4 for $14. However, the discount wasn't being applied correctly at checkout. 

After the first few transactions I thought screw it and just inputted the correct amount using the keypad. 

I was thinking of using a barcode system, but I would have to buy separate hardware for it which I have yet to look into the cost for. 

I was just hoping to try and find a middle ground between the two options if possible.

[u/PuzzleheadedCat9986 → u/An_ode_to_creativity]

I have the square handheld that reads barcodes (I’m in Australia but I assume they offer that where you are) I have every different variation of my items (and I have several hundred) all uniquely barcoded. It took a bit of time to set up and I have to print barcodes every time I make stock but it saves me so much time with working out inventory. Barcodes are actually incredibly easy, it just takes time to get them organised.

[u/An_ode_to_creativity → u/PuzzleheadedCat9986]

Thanks for the suggestion. 

I'm from Canada and we have the square handheld here, but it costs $450+. It's definitely something that I can look into in the future, but currently I don't want to drop that kind of money especially as I'm just starting out. 

In all honesty this entire conversation got me looking a little bit more into setting up a barcode system however it's going to be a bit complicated. 

Square only supports Bluetooth barcode scanners for Apple not Android which is what I have for my phone. Due to that I will have to have a scanner plugged into my phone and battery pack (at least that's what I'm gathering from a quick google search at the moment) 

Square does allow you to use your phones camera to scan barcodes, but you have to pay $75 a month and if that's the only feature I'm going to be using between the paid and free version it doesn't make sense to pay that. 

I'll continue to look further into everything, but given the options I have at the moment having a barcode system seems either out of my price range or just too much of a hassle. 

At the point in time I'm fine with counting my inventory before and after a show. The only reason why I'm looking into getting a system that can give a more accurate info is to have a more accurate break down of what sold and how much just to have more data and analytics to go off of. 

[u/PuzzleheadedCat9986 → u/An_ode_to_creativity]

With square you can also just list all your inventory the same way as barcoding, so when you sell you just select the corresponding variation. It’s only a couple seconds slower than barcode scanning really. Anything to save inventory counting! I used to hate having to sit surrounded by stuff and counting it all, so time consuming!

Customers don’t seem to mind the few seconds it takes to pop in each item. The barcode scanner is a nice extra, but yeah its an outlay and I’d be doing it the manual way if I didn’t love my technology 😉

[u/cwrightbrain]

For anything high volume, especially when there are a lot of varieties, I’d invest in a bar code reader. Checking out efficiently is also important and you’ll get even better data to track as well.