Market Day Collective
Run an event that stallholders and attendees beg you to repeat.
Event management, straightened out.
Anybody in your community can set up a market day here and get their own themed pages to run it from: an event page, an interest page, a stall form, booking forms for food, drinks and the creche, and every questionnaire that goes out. You bring the idea and the people. We bring the order of operations, the arithmetic and the questions worth asking before you commit to anything.
What we do
Three things, and they are the three that sink people.
A market day is not hard because anything in it is hard. It is hard because forty small things have to happen in an order nobody tells you, and four of them cost money before any money comes in.
The order of operations
From the first idea to the debrief, in the order it actually happens: gauge interest before you size anything, size the hall before you book it, price the stall before you invite anybody to pay for one.
Every stage tells you what it needs, where that comes from, and what it feeds next.
Your own themed pages
Pick a theme and every page your day puts in front of a person carries it: the event page, the interest page, the stall form, the food and drinks and creche booking forms, the out of state seller form, and the marketing pack you print from.
Your logo, your colours, your name on it. Not ours.
The arithmetic
The stall fee worked from real costs instead of what feels reasonable. The ticket price solved so nobody is out of pocket. The floor space worked from stalls and rows rather than a number off a hall's website.
And the cashflow, so you can see the deepest point before you reach it.
How it works
Eight stages, and you are never guessing what comes next.
- Say what you have in mindA date range, a rough place, and who it is for. Nothing is booked.
- Your pages go liveThemed, on your own address, ready to send to your community.
- Find out who is inSellers, helpers, kitchen, creche, and how many would come.
- Size the floorThose numbers give you the square metres to go looking for.
- Go and look at hallsOne record per venue, fourteen sections, filled in on the spot.
- Price itStall fee and ticket price solved together against the real costs.
- Open the stallsStall type and size trigger the bring list, the paperwork and the pitch.
- Run the day, then close itRun sheet, roles, the gate, and a clean record for next year.
Before you commit to anything
Should you be the one running it?
Six questions about the day you have in mind and what you have around you. Nothing is sent anywhere, nothing is stored, and nothing it says stops you doing anything. It is worth two minutes before a hall is booked rather than after.
Before you commit to anything
Two things worth reading first.
What running an event actually takes
Every job a market day needs somebody to own, split into fourteen departments so it can be handed out rather than carried by one person, plus the full list of what has to exist before the doors open.
Read the listWhat you are responsible for as lead organiser
The date, the venue, the go or no go, the money, the paperwork and the people. Written out plainly, including the parts that are yours personally and the parts you can hand over.
Read what you would be taking onWhat it looks like here
What we provide, how, and what we do not do.
What we provide
- Your own market day, with its own theme, logo, colours and name
- Themed public pages: the event page, the interest page and every form
- Themed questionnaires, so what you send out looks like your day and not like a survey
- The setup runway, stage by stage, with what each one needs
- The calculators: floor space, stall fee, ticket price, cashflow
- Venue records, one per hall, from the checklist you take with you
- Checklists you can fill in here or print and carry
- A contact book that remembers people between one day and the next
- An app for the day itself: the gate, the roles, the run sheet
How
- One fee for your market day, quoted before anything is built. You see the number and what is in it before you decide
- It is a fee for the day, never a share of what a stall took. We do not see those and we never will
- Agreed in writing, so it goes into your budget on day one rather than surprising you in week ten
- Nothing is booked, signed or paid by us on your behalf, ever
- Your sellers take their own payments, by their own method
- Ticket, food and creche money goes into your account, not ours
- Every number we show you can be argued with, because we show the working
- You can use it entirely on your own, or with us behind you
What we do not do
Wherever you are the organiser, which is everything except handing the running of it to us:
- We do not book your venue or sign your hire agreement
- We do not carry your costs, and we are not your insurer
- We do not decide whether your day goes ahead. That call is yours
Whatever we quoted you, including running it for you:
- We do not give legal or financial advice. We tell you which questions to ask and who to ask them of
- We do not take a cut of a stallholder's sales, and we never see them
- We do not hide a number that makes a day look worse than it is
How you start
A conversation first, then a quote you are free to turn down.
There is no price list on this site, and that is deliberate. No two market days want the same things from this system, so we talk first, quote second, and you decide third. An account here is still free; it is running a market day that is quoted.
What we will stand behind
Use this system the way it is laid out and it will put the decisions that matter in front of you before they cost anything: whether the hall is big enough, what the stall fee has to be, what your sellers need to make it worth their day, and where the money is deepest underwater.
That is what makes a stallholder book the next one without being asked, and it is what makes an attendee turn up early. We will not promise you a crowd. We will promise that you will not be guessing, and that nothing here will hide a number from you to make your day look better than it is.