spent 60 on a booth at a flea market and made 210. the math is bad and i'd do it again
Three weekends ago I paid 60 for a table at a flea market out past the highway. Two folding chairs, no tent, sun in my eyes until noon.
Sold 210. Two small pieces and a stack of prints. If I count the hours and the framing I lost money. Badly.
But here's the thing nobody says in the pricing threads. I got four conversations that mattered more than the sales. A woman stood in front of one piece for probably ten minutes and then told me about her mother's house, which is the whole reason I make anything. Another guy took my card and emailed me Tuesday, wants to see the bigger work. That's not a lead from a reel, that's a person who touched the actual surface.
Online I get 40 likes and nothing. In person I get one person who really looks.
The part that stings is that it's not scalable. I can't do this every weekend, my back won't take it and it eats the studio time. I keep looking for a version of this that lives on a screen and I can't find one. Everything that actually reaches somebody seems to cost me a Saturday and a sunburn.
Anyway I'm doing it again next month. If you've done the table thing, what actually sells for you, prints or the real stuff. I haven't figured out the ratio and I'm pricing blind.
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Honey, that woman standing there ten minutes is the sale. The rest is just gas money.
I used to do the same math on myself at church bazaars, add up the hours, the fabric, the thread, and come home feeling like I'd been foolish. Then my granddaughter told me I was counting the wrong column. Somebody telling you about her mother's house means your cloth did the one thing it's supposed to do, and you can't put a price on that at a table with no tent and the sun in your eyes.
That email Tuesday is worth more than the 210, too. Framing'll come back around. Keep going out there.
the wrong column. yeah. i've been doing that math my whole life, and i did logistics for fifteen years so i'm good at it.
the ten minutes thing is what got me. i keep thinking about the fact that she didn't say anything nice about it. she just told me about the house.
church bazaars sounds like the same table with worse parking. what do you make?
"Counting the wrong column" is a good way to put it, though I'd say the real trouble is that we count in hours and the thing only ever pays out in years. I sold a small panel once for almost nothing to a woman who stood in front of it a long while, and eight years later she came back for a proper commission. You cannot put that in the ledger at the table. Sometimes, bof, you can. Rarely.