Why didn't I sell anything at my craft fair?

Almost certainly not because your work isn't good enough, so can we get that one out of the way first. A quiet fair mostly comes down to who happened to walk past your table, and I know how little that helps when you got up at 5am, loaded the car in the dark, sat behind that table for 6 hours watching people pick things up and put them down again, then packed the whole lot away and drove home with nearly everything you'd brought.

I've done the early starts and the long tables, back when quilts and bags were what I made for a living, and I've had the exact day I've just described more than once. So none of this is coming from somebody who has only ever sold from behind a screen, and I'm not about to tell you the answer was a nicer tablecloth.

Was it my stall or was it just a bad fair?

The feeling first, because a bad fair stings in a way a quiet week online never does. A quiet week online is a number not moving. A quiet fair is watching actual human beings look at the thing you made, hold it up, smile at it, and decide against it, over and over, all day, while you try to look busy behind the table. Of course it lands personally. You watched them decide.

But a browsing crowd choosing not to spend on a drizzly Saturday tells you about the crowd and the day far more often than it tells you anything about your work. Some fairs are genuinely just duds. Wrong town, wrong weekend, a clash with something bigger up the road, an organiser who put more energy into selling tables than into getting shoppers through the door. If the makers either side of you were also packing up grumbling, you probably already have your answer for that one.

What actually decides whether a fair goes well?

A handful of boring, unglamorous things, mostly, and I'd walk through them honestly before you change a single thing about what you make.

Whether the fair matched what you sell. A handmade quilt needs a crowd that came out expecting to spend properly on handmade, and plenty of fairs are full of people who came for a nice day out, holding a coffee, budgeting for the cake stall. Lovely people, just not your buyers that day.

Footfall and weather, which you control not at all. Rain halves a crowd, proper sunshine sends them to the beach instead, and neither one holds any opinion about your stitching.

Whether your table reads as one clear thing from 3 metres away. Shoppers decide from the aisle whether to come over, and a table that says quilts, made by someone who clearly knows what she's doing, pulls people in where a jumble of everything you've ever made lets them slide past.

Whether you could take card without any faff, because hardly anyone carries cash now and every "do you take card?" answered with a wince is a sale walking off.

And whether there was an easy yes on the table. Something small and inexpensive lets the person who loves your work but can't stretch to the big piece still become a customer today, and customers come back in a way admirers don't.

Every one of those is worth fixing before your next fair. And you can fix all of them and still have a dead day, which is the part that took me far too long to understand.

Why do some makers sell out at craft fairs?

Look back at that list, because every single thing on it is about the same stranger: whoever happened to walk past. The crowd the fair pulled, the weather that shrank it, the mood of people browsing. All of it hangs on being found, on the day, by chance.

Which is when it clicked for me that a craft fair is a listing you have to stand behind for 6 hours. You pay for the pitch instead of a listing fee, you set out the table instead of uploading photos, and then you wait to be found by whoever wanders by. It's exactly the same bet as putting something up on Etsy and hoping, except this time you're also cold, tired, and watching it not work in real time.

But have you considered the makers who clear their tables? Nearly every time, they're the ones who brought people with them. They told their list and their followers the week before: I'll be at this fair, this is what I'm bringing, come and find me at the stall by the door. A handful of people arriving on purpose to find you changes the whole day, and it changes it before you've even unloaded the car. They buy, other shoppers see a busy table and drift over, and suddenly you're the stall everyone stops at.

Nothing draws a crowd at a fair like a crowd

That's a launch. The same idea exactly, just with a postcode attached. I know both halves of this from the hairbow years, because one Christmas fair made me a good few hundred pounds over a day, which felt enormous at the time, and then I did a fair in Barry where nobody came. All day. A whole Saturday, the pitch fee, the setting up and the packing down, and I drove home with the same stock I'd arrived with. The bows had not got worse in the fortnight in between. I was simply in a room with nobody in it, and there is no version of a nicer tablecloth that fixes that.

Christmas fair season is where this bites hardest, and if you're booking autumn and winter fairs now, the runway thinking is spelled out in when to start your Christmas collection. The selling happens before the day. Fairs are no different, they just come with a longer drive.

What should I do at my next fair, even if I sell nothing?

Leave with more than an empty cash box, because the most valuable thing you can carry home from a fair was never the takings.

Think about the woman who stopped at your table. She picked up the bag, turned it over, asked how long it took you to make, told you it was beautiful, and put it back down. Most makers hand her a business card and hope, and a card asks her to do all the remembering: keep it safe, recall your name in 3 months when she wants a birthday present, somehow find her way back to you from a name on a bit of card. It goes in a coat pocket and that's usually the end of it.

She liked your work enough to stop, hold it, and talk to you about it, and she walks away forever unless you ask. A sign-up sheet on the table, or a QR code propped by the card reader, or simply asking whether she'd like to hear when the next collection is ready. Do that all day and a fair where you sold nothing still sends you home with a little list of people who already love what you make. Why a maker needs that list at all is a whole post of its own, and it's here: why every maker needs an email list.

A sign-up sheet is only any use if there's something behind it, and getting that standing is the Handmade Launch List, free, at the end of which the names you collect actually land somewhere. Take it to the next fair and the woman who picked up the bag has somewhere to put hers.

Somewhere in that crowd was a woman who picked up the thing you made and told you it was lovely. She went home with your business card, and you went home with no way of ever reaching her again