How many earring cards should you order?

This is the last thing you choose before ordering, and it is the one people get wrong in both directions: a pack of 25 that runs out on the Saturday of a two-day market, or 500 cards carrying a logo you replaced two months later.

There is no formula that fits every maker, but the decision comes down to three honest questions.

1. Is your branding settled?

If your logo, name or colours are still moving, buy the smallest pack that covers your next event. A 25 is not the economical choice per card, and it is absolutely the right choice for a design you are still testing in the wild. Watching people pick up your cards at one market teaches you more about the design than another evening of tweaking it.

If the branding has been the same for a year and you are re-ordering the same card, the maths flips — the price per card drops sharply at the larger packs, and cards do not expire.

2. How do the pieces actually leave your hands?

Cards get consumed at very different rates depending on how you sell:

• Markets and craft fairs consume the most — every pair on the table is on a card all day, whether or not it sells, and cards get handled, bent and swapped.
• Online orders consume exactly one card per pair sold, and the card doubles as your packaging insert.
• Wholesale and consignment consume a card per piece too, and shops often expect them, since a carded pair sits on their display without extra work.

A useful rule of thumb: count the pairs you would put out at your biggest event, add the pairs you expect to ship before your next order, then add a margin for handling damage. That number, rounded up to the next pack, is a sensible order.

3. How often do you want to think about this again?

Cards are cheap; running out is not. A market weekend with no cards means loose earrings in a bowl, which reads as a hobby rather than a business, on the one day you have paid for a table.

Buy for your next two events, not your next two years — unless the design is settled, in which case buy for the year.

Where the packs land

• 25 — testing a design, a single small market, or ordering several designs at once to see which one people pick up.
• 100 — the working pack for most makers: a season of markets or a few months of online orders, and the point where custom printing starts.
• 500 — a settled design, a busy stall, or a wholesale run, at the lowest price per card.

Custom-printed packs start at 100. Below that we sell the same cuts blank, which is genuinely useful while you are testing: stamp them, sticker them, or write on them, and switch to printed once the design stops moving.

One more thing about ordering several designs

If you sell studs and statement pieces, you probably need two sizes rather than two hundred of one. The sizes guide covers what fits on each cut, and ordering a small pack of each is usually a better first order than a big pack of one.

Every pack size and its price sits on the shop page — pick a size, pick a stock, and the price per card is right there before you commit.