Not every busy show is a good show. This short is the quick version of the number I use to tell them apart: FairKeep takes what a show netted and divides it by the hours it was open. The full walkthrough post on income per hour goes deeper.
Why Totals Mislead
A two-day festival will almost always out-earn a three-hour evening market, but that doesn't make it the better show. Income per hour uses net, meaning after the booth fee and costs, not gross sales. Dividing by the hours open puts long and short shows on the same footing.
What It Tells You
A show with a big gross and a big booth fee can end up with a lower income per hour than a small local market. When you're deciding which applications to send next season, that's the comparison that matters.
- Shows near the top of the list are the ones to apply to again.
- Shows near the bottom are candidates to drop, unless something in your Event Diary explains a bad day.
To get the number, the show needs to be logged with its hours, booth fee, income and costs, and the how to track a craft fair post covers that. For the full explanation, read is this craft fair worth it? income per hour explained.
FairKeep is free to start and doesn't ask for a credit card, so you can try FairKeep with your own shows. If you haven't seen the app before, the two-minute tour of FairKeep covers the dashboard, events, applications, calendar, packing list, reports and integrations in one pass, and my FairKeep overview has the bigger picture. For the free calculators and tools that sit alongside it, see the VendorTools hub.
More short how-tos on the VARØ Industries YouTube channel.