Craft fair booth or Etsy listing? Costing one soy candle and running both sales channels

Dana pours soy candles in 8 oz amber jars at her kitchen table, 48 at a time. By late October she has roughly a hundred holiday scents cured and labeled: fir and orange, cranberry, a smoky cedar that outsold everything last year. A church hall holiday fair has offered her a table for Saturday, December 5, 2026, at $110. Her Etsy shop already lists the same candles. The question she actually has is narrow: should 52 of those candles go to the fair, or stay on Etsy and ship one order at a time through December?

Answering it takes three calculators in a fixed order. The candle has to be costed first, because both channels need a cost per unit. The fair and the Etsy listing are then two separate profit models fed by that one number. The trap is that each tool counts slightly different things, so the hand-offs between them matter more than any single result.

This is a worked example, not financial or tax advice. Fee rates are quoted as of October 2026; check each platform's own page before you price.

Step 1: cost one candle, and decide what "cost" includes

The Candle Making Cost Calculator builds a unit cost from the recipe up. Dana's inputs come from her last supplier invoices:

Input	Value	Note
Wax cost	$3.40/lb	soy container wax bought by the case
Candle wax weight	7 oz	an "8 oz" jar is a fluid-ounce size; it holds about 7 oz of wax by weight
Fragrance load	9%	of wax weight
Fragrance oil	$1.90/oz	16 oz bottles
Pour waste	5%	pitcher residue, a test pour
Wick / jar with lid / label / box	$0.18 / $1.85 / $0.22 / $0.55	gift box for every candle
Labor	9 min per candle at $20/hr	melt, pour, wick, trim, label, box
Batch / markup	48 candles / 2.75×	the tool's default markup

The tool returns $2.76 for wax plus fragrance (0.63 oz of oil at 9%), $3.00 of labor, a unit cost of $8.56 and a suggested price of $23.54. The batch of 48 costs $410.83 to make. Dana lists at a round $24.

Set the labor minutes to zero and the same recipe gives a unit cost of $5.56. Keep both numbers. The $5.56 is what leaves her bank account per candle; the $8.56 also pays her for the pouring. Which one goes into the next tool changes what the next tool's answer means, and that is the first hand-off trap.

Where the candle model stops being accurate

• Labor is per candle, not per batch. The input is labeled minutes per candle and the code multiplies it directly, so 9 minutes is $3.00 on every jar. If you time a whole batch session, divide by the batch size before typing it in. Batch size only scales the batch total; it never changes the unit cost.
• Fragrance is a share of wax weight, added on top. Some makers calculate load as a share of the finished blend instead. At 9% the difference is a few cents, but it matters if you are reading a supplier's maximum load.
• Waste applies to wax only. The 5% is added to the wax line, not to fragrance oil, jars or wicks. A cracked jar or a candle that sinkholes and gets remelted is not in the model, so a real reject rate needs to be folded into the waste figure or the jar cost.
• Markup multiplies everything, labor included. At 2.75× her own wage is marked up too. That is fine for retail, but it is why the suggested price looks high next to a material-only cost.
• No test burns, wick testing, cure time, shipping cartons or display props are counted.

The walkthrough of the candle cost stack covers each of those lines in more depth. Here the point is narrower: you now have $8.56 and $5.56, and you have to choose.

Step 2: the fair, with the 2026 mileage rate

The Craft Fair Profit Calculator takes booth costs, an average sale price, COGS as a percentage of that price, units and hours. Dana's inputs:

• Booth fee $110, plus $35 for the organizer's 6-foot table and two chairs (the rental field).
• 46 miles round trip.
• Mileage rate $0.76, the tool's default. That is the IRS business rate for July 1 to December 31, 2026; it was 72.5 cents for January to June (see the standard mileage rates page on irs.gov). Check it again in January, when the IRS usually sets a new rate.
• Average sale price $23 per candle, because a "two for $44" sign pulls the average below $24.
• COGS 37%, which is $8.56 divided by $23: the full cost including her pouring labor.
• 52 candles sold, 10.5 hours door to door including loading, setup and teardown.

Result: total expenses $179.96 (booth $110 + travel $34.96 + rental $35), revenue $1,196.00, gross profit $573.52, an effective wage of $54.62/hr, and break-even at 13 candles.

Now the hand-off trap. If Dana had used the material-only cost, COGS would be 24% ($5.56 ÷ $23), and the same day shows $729.00 gross profit and $69.43/hr. That second wage looks better only because it is also paying for the hours she spent pouring 52 candles in October. Using the full $8.56 means the $54.62 is purely what the fair day earned on top of an already-paid making wage. Pick one convention and use it in both channels, or the comparison is rigged before it starts.

What the fair model leaves out

The tool subtracts booth, travel, rental and COGS, then divides by hours. Three costs are missing for a candle stall:

• Card fees. Square's US in-person rate on its free plan is 2.6% + 15¢ per tap, dip or swipe (per Square's own fees page at the time of writing). If $950 of the $1,196 comes in over 30 card payments, that is $29.20, which takes gross profit to $544.32 and the hourly figure to $51.84.
• Sales tax is your job at a fair. On Etsy the marketplace collects and remits US sales tax for you. At an in-person fair, collecting and filing it usually falls on the seller under the state's rules, which takes admin time the hours field does not see.
• The unsold stock. The tool treats units as sold. Candles that come home still cost nothing extra, but holiday scents sell slower after December 25.

A slow fair is the real risk. At 25 candles instead of 52, the same inputs give $182.29 gross profit and $17.36/hr, below her $20 target. The break-even of 13 is the floor; the hourly wage is the number that says whether the Saturday was worth it. The post on judging a booth fee goes further into reading those two outputs.

Step 3: the same candle on Etsy

The Etsy Fee & Profit Calculator needs the item price, shipping charged, item cost, actual shipping and monthly quantity. Dana charges $24 plus $8.50 shipping. Her Ground Advantage labels average $8.95 for a boxed jar that weighs a little over a pound, and the shipping carton and padding add $1.10, so actual shipping is $10.05. Item cost is the same $8.56. She sells about 20 a month in the holiday season.

With the default US fees the tool returns revenue of $32.50, total fees of $3.54, net profit of $10.35 per candle (31.9%) and $207.05 a month.

Those defaults match Etsy's Fees & Payments Policy (etsy.com/legal/fees) and Etsy Payments Policy as of October 2026: a $0.20 listing fee, charged again each time one unit of a multi-quantity listing sells; a 6.5% transaction fee on the item price plus shipping and gift wrap (US sellers are not charged it on sales tax); and US payment processing of 3% + $0.25 per order.

Three things the Etsy run shows

1. Free shipping is fee-neutral. Rerun at $32.50 with $0 shipping and the answer is identical: $3.54 in fees and $10.35 profit. Etsy's percentages apply to item plus delivery, so moving the $8.50 into the price changes how the listing looks in search, not what Etsy takes.
2. Offsite Ads change the picture on the orders they touch. Etsy charges 15% of an attributed order (12% for shops past $10,000 in trailing-year sales, where the program also becomes mandatory), capped at $100 per order. Put 15 in the ads field and the candle earns $5.48 (16.9%). The tool applies that percentage to every sale, so for a monthly view enter a blended figure: if one order in five is attributed, use 3.
3. Multi-candle orders are where Etsy pays. Two candles at $48 with $10.50 shipping and a $12.40 label: set the listing fee to $0.40 (two units sold, two renewals) and item cost to $17.12. Profit is $22.77 for the order, because one label now covers two jars.

One gap in the tool: Etsy assesses processing on the gross order including sales tax, and the calculator leaves tax out. On a $32.50 order with 7% tax that is about 7 cents more in fees than it shows. Small per order, but it means the tool's fee figure is a slight undercount, not an exact match to your statement. The Etsy fee breakdown explains the order the fees are applied in.

Side by side: 52 candles, two ways

	Holiday fair	Etsy, no ads
Price to buyer	$23 average	$24 + $8.50 shipping
Profit per candle after full cost	$10.47 (after card fees)	$10.35
Profit on 52 candles	$544.32	about $538
Hours for that profit	10.5 on one day	about 9 over the season
Time to sell 52	one Saturday	about 11 weeks at 20 a month
Main risk	a slow day (25 sold = $17.36/hr)	Offsite Ads orders at $5.48

The Etsy hours are an estimate the tool does not make: about 6 minutes to pack and label each order plus an hour or so a month of photos, messages and listing upkeep, roughly 3.5 hours for 20 orders. That works out near $59 an hour, which looks better than the fair's $51.84. The catch is the bottom two rows. At 20 a month, 52 candles take about 11 weeks to sell on Etsy, which from early December runs into late February, and most of these are Christmas scents.

Per candle, the two channels land within 12 cents of each other. That is the useful finding: the candle itself is priced well enough that neither channel loses. The decision comes down to timing and risk, not margin.

What Dana decided, and why

She booked the fair and kept the Etsy listings live. The fair clears seasonal stock in one day, with a break-even of 13 candles that she has beaten at every fair she has done. Etsy keeps selling the year-round scents, where an 11-week sell-through does not matter. Two smaller changes came straight out of the numbers:

• She added a two-candle bundle on Etsy, since the two-jar order earns $22.77 against $20.70 for two single orders.
• She left Offsite Ads on (her shop is under the $10,000 threshold, so she could opt out) after checking the worst case: a single candle on a 15% attributed order still clears $5.48.

Checklist before you book a table

1. Cost the candle once, with labor, and write down both the full and material-only unit cost.
2. Use the same one as COGS at the fair and as item cost on Etsy.
3. Check the fair tool's mileage rate against the current IRS figure (76 cents from July 2026).
4. Subtract card fees from the fair's gross profit by hand.
5. Run Etsy with and without your Offsite Ads rate, and once with a multi-item order.
6. Compare hours and sell-through time, not just profit per unit.