What Has to Be True Before You Can Drop a Market

I’m writing this between the Georgia Apple Festival and the start of the Christkindl Market, which is an odd time to write about quitting markets. We’re in the busiest stretch of our year for in-person events, and a huge share of our sales comes from them. So let me be clear up front: we’re not dropping anything today. This is about what has to be true before we could, and why “not yet” is the right answer for now.

Why we want to

Scaling a small business past markets is a numbers game. We’re grateful for every customer we meet at a table, and we’re glad we’ve been able to make a difference in people’s routines. But at any market, we’re only ever in front of the people who make the effort to attend that market, and not even all of them are potential customers. Only a subset are.

If we put that effort into wholesale and direct-to-consumer sales nationally, we can reach far more people, on their terms, instead of waiting for them to wander past our tent. Markets are great for trust and relationships, but they cap how many people you can reach. They also take a lot of work, and that work comes at a real opportunity cost.

Why we can’t yet

Here’s the catch. Even though a market puts us in front of a smaller pool, that pool is consistent. People show up, and they buy. Our website and wholesale channels aren’t there yet, and “not there yet” is the whole story.

The simplest test we’ve come up with is this: we drop a market once our online and wholesale sales are consistently producing the volume that market produces. Not once in a good month. Consistently. Until then, dropping a market just means losing revenue we know we can count on and hoping something else fills the gap.

What has to be true

Four things, as best we can tell:

1. Replacement revenue has to be real and steady. Weekly and monthly sales through the website and wholesale need to match what a market brings in, consistently, before we drop one that produces similar revenue.
2. Customer outreach has to work. We’re still building this out in Klaviyo: the right communication flows, upsells, abandoned cart follow-ups, and the rest. It’s a huge part of the e-commerce equation, and no amount of ad spend will bridge the gap if it’s broken. (This will get its own post once we know what we’re talking about.)
3. We need a repeatable way to drive new traffic. We pay attention to SEO, AEO, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs, and people still have trouble finding us. We need an ad creative process and a delivery strategy. If we can’t consistently bring in new customers and make the most of the ones we already have, we’re dead in the water as a business.
4. Production and cash flow have to hold up. Production isn’t the problem right now. We can make more than we currently send out on market days, and wholesale has a steady cadence that makes planning easier. Cash flow is fine today too: Faire pays us when we deliver while retailers get their payment terms, so the timing gap isn’t hurting us. A big-box retailer would change that math completely. Depending on the order, we could be fronting tens of thousands of dollars or more and still need to cover everything else until the invoice is paid. That’s a real concern, and it’s a gamble we’d take, because the payoff is so much bigger.

What markets still do for us

Even after those four things are true, markets will have a role. They’re where we get in-person feedback on quality and pricing, which we can’t easily get online. They let us try different ways of displaying products over and over, and then pass along to retailers what has actually worked. And they’re a cheap, low-risk way to soft launch a product and see how people respond, without building a whole online campaign around something nobody wants.

What goes first

If I had to pick, it would be a weekly market. We love the people who run it and our fellow vendors, but it’s a lot of work, and that work competes with building a bigger customer base. We’re not there yet, and we won’t drop it until the numbers say we can.

The point isn’t that markets are bad. They built this brand. The point is that you can’t drop a reliable channel until its replacement is just as reliable, and the replacement has to be built before you need it. That’s the unglamorous part of scaling a small business: the new channel has to exist before the old one goes.