← Craft Fair Packing Checklist
Fair mornings have a physics of their own: everyone arrives at once, the car park is a diagram of poor decisions, and the seller flapping at 8:55 is usually the one who arrived at 8:15 "because setup only takes twenty minutes". Setup does take twenty minutes. Everything around setup takes an hour.
Vehicle packed (in reverse unload order — display last so it's out first), float counted and written down, card reader and power bank on charge, clothes chosen for a building whose temperature you can't predict, organiser's arrival instructions actually read. The fairs that start badly almost always started badly the previous evening.
Organisers stagger arrival windows for a reason: one van at the unloading door at a time. Early looks keen but often means waiting in a queue you created; late means carrying boxes through browsing customers, which organisers remember at next year's allocation. Hit your window, unload everything to your pitch first without setting anything up, then move the car — the unloading bay is the fair's scarcest resource and hogging it is the fastest way to become locally famous.
Tablecloth, then height (risers/stands), then stock, then prices, then the fiddly styling — in that order, across the whole table, so at any interruption the stall still looks whole. Do the payments check the moment the table is stable: card reader awake, test tap if your provider offers one, float tin in position, tally sheet and pen where your hand expects them.
First, walk five steps out front and look at your stall as a stranger — is the price visible from browsing distance? Can someone tell in three seconds what you sell? Fix that before perfecting anything else. Second, eat something and put water where you can reach it; the first rush never warns you. Then breathe — the doors open, and the people walking in are the ones who chose to spend their Saturday looking at things like yours.
General guidance from published stallholder practice, August 2026. CAAC.