Your first market can feel equal parts exciting and terrifying.
You spend weeks preparing, planning all of your products, buying every piece of equipment you can think of, organising signage, and trying to make everything look professional.
Then somewhere in the middle of all that excitement, the doubt starts creeping in.
What if nobody buys? What if I don’t make my money back? What if I’ve forgotten something important? What if everyone else looks more professional than me?
We know that feeling because we’ve been there ourselves.
Before our first market, we had absolutely no idea what we were doing. We overpacked some things, forgot others, stressed about every tiny detail and put a huge amount of pressure on ourselves to make it “worth it”.
What we eventually realised is that markets are not just about making sales. They are about learning, building confidence, meeting your customers. As you continue to grow you improve your setup, understand your products better, and slowly turning your little idea into something real.
This guide was created for the small business owner, home baker or creative who wants to start markets but feels overwhelmed by where to even begin.
Inside, we walk through the real things we wish somebody had told us before our first market, from setup and preparation through to pricing, stock planning, surviving the day itself and avoiding common mistakes that can make markets feel far more stressful than they need to be.
This is written from years of real experience doing markets while building Sweet as El around full time work, family life and all the chaos that comes with running a small business.
If you’ve been waiting for a sign to finally book your first market, this might just be it.
