Maybe no one else fancied filling in the form! Sounds like a nightmare and I’m used to filling in forms as I used to work in a chemistry lab.
Sasha
I don’t think £30 is too high for an established, well publicised, venue, although the lack of cover would put me off as I don’t have my own gazebo - but I know a lot of people do. Round here I always prefer to be inside as you’re never safe from unexpected gusts of wind even on the seemingly calmest of days!
As for the risk assessment, more and more organisers are asking for them, once you’ve filled one in they’re never quite as difficult again!
Ah but it isn’t !
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I gave up on craft fairs about 2 years ago when luckily a group of us managed to open our own shop with some financial backing. Having a shop on the high street means your products are available 7 days a week with an average weekly footfall of 500+.Also you can control the types of goods for sale and maintain high standards. I now only do the odd charity event.
Wow , that would be my dream Lorna. Years ago in Reading we used to have an amazing shop that sold nothing my hand made goods made in the UK by British craftspeople. Sadly it closed down. We had nothing then until we got Evolution which basically sold hand crafted items from developing countries and a percentage of the profits went back to the communities and projects in those countries . That has now closed as well so Reading is now full of boring high street shops and a sudden influx of designer shops which is ridiculous because the majority of people in Reading are low to middle earners… not top wage earners !!! The rent for shops in Reading is beyond the means of most people so you would need a serious amount of money to be able to open a shop ( still hoping for a lottery win !! 
I am preparing for a craft fair tomorrow. So far I have put the word out on social media and local radio. I have no idea what, if anything, the organiser has done! I used to enjoy standing for the National Trust but in my area they have stopped ALL fairs! I, and many other local businesses, can expect to be several hundred pounds down on takings this year as a result. I used to be an antiques and collectables dealer and watched this area of sales get progressively swamped by people who didn’t know what they were doing; I was tempted to tough it out but this was thrown out of the equation when we had a major car accident and were minus a car (and physical ability) for several months. That area of business is now almost totally absent from this county and our favourite organiser now concentrates on the NW where business is good. I feel that if the National Trust experience is anything to go by there is still a market out there for handmade but the hard fact is that most organisers think that one mention on FB is enough to get the crowds in. How wrong can you get?
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I think your experience gives us useful info on the bigger picture out there. I am a NT member, but didn’t realise they stopped all fairs on their sites. There must be a reason, maybe it’s because they had a serious fire on one site recently, and their insurance premiums just shot up !
It could be that by not having fairs, the insurers saw it at reduced risk of incidents and fires, even though the recent fire was not linked to any fair being present.
Not all NT have stopped fairs. My local NT property has 2 main events per year and this year is doing a small monthly craft fair as well. Unfortunately they are not the most organised and advertising doesn’t seem to enter the equation.! I have done their fairs for the past couple of years and will be doing so again this year, I don’t really expect much from them due to lack of advertising but it is only 2 miles up the road and I really enjoy the atmosphere there.
I do an excellent Christmas fair at a NT property in Sussex every year and it is really well-advertised, well-attended and successful…but it is organised by one person who puts in a huge amount of effort every year, and without whom it probably wouldn’t happen. It pays to look around and check out the fairs before parting with cash - ask the stallholders whether it’s worth doing or not, most are very open and honest about them.
I didn’t say that ALL NT properties had stopped fairs, only the ones in my area! I am only too painfully aware of the fact that the general manager of two local properties can’t be bothered. After years of expanding this fair and the number of marquees used they have just pulled the plug, blaming everything and everyone and not telling the truth for why this decision has been taken. By this time next year they will have realised how much money they have lost in the process. Unfortunately, so will the traders. By the way, advertising and organisation were superb which is why the footfall was so high.
I can’t disagree with any of that Christine and it’s good to know that some counties are still showing some sense. As a NT events volunteer I am aware of how much time and effort used to go into organising our fairs, but as the former events manager pointed out the fairs we have now lost were not the most difficult or stressful to arrange. In this county the possibility of checking out fairs is severely limited because there are so few of them, and the hard fact is that stallholders and organisers are not always honest when you ask a direct question. I have been told that some fairs are dreadful, only to make 4 times my sales target! I think the only way forward it to just “go for it” and hope for the best.
Hi Ronald - it should be understood that the NT has not stopped fairs at all their properties, but they certainly have at 2 properties in my county, one of which is very large and the other sister property which is desperate for a new roof. The decision to do this was made 12 months ago, and when I warned people that this would happen they didn’t believe me so they had quite a shock when the Trust informed them officially. It has nothing to do with insurance but with a general manager who has no commercial sense (despite a commercial background, allegedly). My real concern with this is that the general public will be, as usual, expecting to turn up with their Christmas shopping lists (and they really do this, sometimes an entire side of A4!) and that we will be there to sell them their presents. There is no evidence that these fairs were losing popularity, in fact the footfall was going up year on year and the marquee space had also been increased year on year. We are talking footfall in the thousands, not hundreds. The problem for non-food sellers is finding a replacement established fair; there aren’t any here!
Hi Ronald, I live in Llandudno, we don’t have many events in North Wales. There was supposed to be a 3 day craft & collectors fair at our local Town Hall. It was the weekend of the Air Show so plenty of people milling around. I was contacted by the organiser 2 days before to say that the fair had been cancelled because so many sellers had cancelled because they had caught " one bug or another" make of that what you will. I had only booked for the Bank Holiday Monday because at £15 a table you need to sell a few cards to cover it. I have joined up with another card seller ( quite a different style to mine) so the rent is halved. We plan to give it this year to see if things pick up. I would prefer to sell online ( no joy yet but I am a newbie) because I’m not a morning person but if we sold a lot the early AM’s would be worth it. Best of Luck Quillextra.
Keep those bugs away !
£15 is a really good table fee in my experience, and halving that with someone else is even better. Over here, the table fee tends to reflect the footfall, and popularity of the fair/event, but that is not always the case.
Also, high footfall does not necessarily mean more customers buying at your stall, and know of very skilled crafters who have had bad experiences , after paying out lots of money.
I do know others who share a marquee / tables frequently, and this seems to work well also for wheelchair-users, who might need assistance with setting-up and packing items away.
Finally, sold a load of my ‘sale’ cards the other day at a big car boot sale, and made a couple of good contacts. Don’t take my main products to car boots, but was really surprised how well we did.
Doesn’t always work, but a sale is still a sale !
That’s interesting that you don’t feel you have many events near you, I live just across the Dee from North Wales and my friends over that way always seem to be doing one event or another. Sometimes I think it’s not that events aren’t happening, more that it’s just not so easy to find out about them until they happen. And sometimes not even then if the organisers aren’t doing their job on the promotion side of things.
I do think it must be nigh on impossible to make it work just selling handmade cards, my best selling events charge rather more than £15 for a table but they are generally worthwhile for me because as well as the usual quantities of smaller pieces I generally sell one or two larger more expensive items. I do make a few cards too but they rarely sell at fairs.
Hi Helen, Thanks for your imput, I agree events are badly publicised. I am a beginner at this and have had to work at finding info. It has just taken 2 telephone calls and 2 emails to get hold of one organiser. He announced himself as being “absolutely shattered” by the amount of work he’s doing. I still havn’t got the details of the event I was enquiring about. Possibly Monday or Tuesday if I’m lucky ! I’ll keep plugging away and see how it goes through this Summer, at least I started at the right time of year.
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I think that craft fairs are no longer popular and I wonder if that’s because in the past, some crafters have charged the earth for goods and craft fairs have got a bad name for being too expensive. A lot of the craft fairs I’ve attended in recent times have been badly organised and badly advertised, so no wonder the footfall was poor. The trouble is, that there are a lot of folk out there that think they can hire a room, put some tables in it and call it a craft fair. They take a lot of money off the crafters and do little else to make it a success. I personally love doing craft fairs, as I find it gets your product out there even if you don’t sell a lot. People come and look and are happy to take a business card. I do however get a buzz from selling something and that’s the icing on the cake !!
I actually find that summer fairs/galas are a much better option to craft fairs now in terms of footfall, as people come to support the community/charity and are more inclined to buy. This for me is the better option now.
I wonder how much he is charging for his stalls/spaces !!! He should be prepared to put in the effort if he is taking money off people !!
Many thanks for your comments, I suppose it’s a case of we need the Fairs more than they need us.
In my experience it’s nearly always the opposite, particularly at smaller fairs the prices are sometimes so low that the maker can barely be covering their material costs let alone paying themselves for their time.
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