How to price soap for craft fairs

The stall fee changes your maths

Online, your costs scale with what you sell. One more bar means one more bar's worth of materials and nothing else. A market day doesn't work like that. You pay for the table whether you sell forty bars or four, so the fee is a lump you have to earn back before a single sale counts as profit.

Most people know their stall fee and stop there, which is how you end up driving home pleased with $180 in the tin and no real idea whether you made anything. The fee is only part of what the day costs you. Your time is the big one, and the hours the market is actually open are only some of it. There's the packing the night before, the setup, the takedown, the drive both ways, and the evening you lose to restocking.

Now put your bars against it. A bar that costs you $2.40 and sells for $8.00 leaves $5.60. Divide $228 by $5.60 and you need to sell forty one bars just to break even on the day. Bar forty two is where you start making money, and if you've never run that number before, it reframes what a quiet market actually costs you.

Tip. Work out your break-even number before you go and write it on your phone. Watching a running count during the day is oddly motivating, and it stops you accepting a lowball bundle at 3pm out of tiredness.

Bundles that don't quietly eat your margin

Three for $20 is the classic soap stall offer and it genuinely works. People who came over to sniff one bar leave with three, your average sale goes up, and you go home with fewer crates. The catch is that a bundle is a discount, and a discount always comes out of the same place your profit does.

At $8.00 a bar, three for $20 means each bar is going for $6.67 instead. Your profit per bar drops from $5.60 to $4.27, so the bundle only pays if it genuinely persuades people to buy more rather than giving a discount to somebody who was going to buy three anyway. Roughly, you need the bundle to lift your average sale by half a bar before it earns its place.

• Price singles at a number that makes the bundle look like the obvious choice, which usually means the bundle saves them about the price of a coffee.
• Never bundle your slowest sellers together, because nobody has ever been tempted by three bars they didn't want.
• Put one popular scent in every bundle so the deal feels real rather than like clearing stock.
• Round to whole dollars. Fumbling for change at a market costs you more in queue length than the coins are worth.

One thing worth protecting: whatever you charge at the market, keep it in line with your online shop. If a customer finds your soap for $6.67 at a stall and $9.00 on your website next week, the website price is the one that starts to feel like a con, and that's the shop you actually want them buying from all winter.

Cure time means paying months before market day

Cold process soap has a problem that candles and jewellery don't. You buy the oils, the lye and the fragrance in March, you spend a Sunday making it, and then it sits on a rack in the spare room until May. The money went out months before any of it can come back.

That gap doesn't change your cost per bar, but it absolutely changes how a market season feels. Book three summer fairs and you're buying supplies for all three before the first one happens. Plenty of soap makers who are perfectly profitable on paper still find themselves broke in April, because profitability and cash flow are not the same thing and only one of them buys more coconut oil.

1. Count backwards from your first market by six weeks and treat that as your real deadline.
2. Make your reliable sellers first and your experiments last, so a batch that misbehaves isn't the batch you were relying on.
3. Keep the receipts from the supply run and check them against what the market actually brings in, rather than guessing.

Watch out. Don't let a slow market talk you into a fire sale. Soap keeps. Discounting a whole crate on a rainy Sunday costs you the money and teaches your regulars to wait for the next bad weather.

Holding your price next to the person opposite

There is always someone. Two tables down, soap at $4 a bar, and a queue. It's demoralising, and it makes perfectly sensible people knock two dollars off their own prices by lunchtime.

Before you move, work out what they'd have to be doing to make $4 pay. Either they're buying melt and pour base in bulk and pouring it into moulds, which is a genuinely cheaper product to make, or they're not counting their own time, or they're treating it as a hobby that funds itself. None of those are things you can copy without becoming a different business, and the last two aren't businesses at all.

Your cost per bar is your cost per bar. If it's $2.40 and you drop to $5, you've cut your profit by nearly half to compete with someone whose numbers you've invented. Match the person opposite and you've handed them control of your pricing, which is a strange thing to give a stranger with a folding table.

• Let people smell everything, because scent sells soap and no photograph ever will.
• Say what's in it out loud. Olive oil, shea butter and a real essential oil blend justify a price in a way that a sign reading handmade does not.
• Have a card or a QR code on the table, since a fair number of your best customers buy nothing on the day and everything in November.

Working out whether the day actually paid

Do this on the Monday, not while you're unloading the car. Take what you took in, subtract what the soap cost you to make, then subtract the stall fee, the petrol and the parking. What's left is what the day paid you. Divide it by the hours the day really took, including the packing and the drive, and you get your hourly rate for the weekend.

Sometimes that number is lovely. Sometimes it's four dollars an hour and you have to sit with it for a minute. Either way it's the only honest way to compare one market against another, and after three or four of them you'll know which ones to rebook and which one you've been going to out of habit since 2023.

A market can still be worth doing at a bad hourly rate, as long as you're choosing it with your eyes open. Wholesale conversations start at markets, so do the custom orders, and so does most of a mailing list. Just don't let a day that lost money get filed in your head as a good one because the tin looked full.