Consignment: what it is, and what to check before you say yes

Fall is prime boutique-stocking season, and a shop owner who liked your booth in July might come back around now with a different kind of offer than "I'd like to carry your line." Instead of buying your inventory outright, they want to take pieces on consignment — display them, sell what sells, and pay you afterward. It sounds close to wholesale, and vendors sometimes treat the two as interchangeable. They're not, and the difference matters for your cash flow, your inventory, and how much control you keep over your own work.

What consignment actually means

With consignment, you're not selling your inventory to the shop — you're loaning it to them. Ownership of each piece stays with you until it actually sells off their shelf. The shop displays your work at no upfront cost to them, and when a piece sells, they keep an agreed share of the sale price and pay you the rest. Anything that doesn't sell within the arrangement's term is yours to take back, unsold, unpaid.

That single fact — you don't get paid until the shop makes a sale — is what separates consignment from every other channel a vendor typically uses.

How it's different from wholesale

Wholesale is a straightforward purchase: the shop buys your inventory from you at a reduced price, upfront, and it becomes theirs. You get paid at the time of the order (or on agreed terms shortly after), whether or not that inventory ever sells to a customer. The shop is taking the risk that the stock might not move, and you're taking a lower per-piece price in exchange for being paid now instead of later.

Consignment flips that risk back onto you. You're not paid until a customer actually buys the piece, and if it sits on the shelf for the length of the agreement without selling, you get it back — not a check. The shop's only cost was shelf space; yours was the piece itself, sitting unpaid in someone else's store for however long that took.

Neither structure is better in every case. Wholesale trades a lower price for certainty; consignment trades that certainty for a shot at your full asking price minus a smaller commission. A shop that isn't confident enough in a new vendor's sell-through to buy outright will often propose consignment instead — reasonably, since it's lower risk for them. That's worth knowing walking in: consignment is frequently the offer a newer or unproven line gets, not necessarily the better deal on the table.

How it's different from selling at your own booth

At your own booth, you set the price, you make the sale, and you keep the full amount minus whatever it cost you to be at that Event that day. Consignment moves the sale somewhere you're not standing — which is the appeal, since your work can earn money on a day you're not working it — but it also means you've lost the parts of a booth sale that are actually yours: the conversation with the customer, the ability to answer a question about the piece, and the immediate payment.

It's also a completely different kind of exposure for the work itself. A booth sale ends the moment the customer walks away with the piece. A consigned piece can sit in a shop for weeks, handled by strangers, displayed under someone else's lighting, sometimes without your name attached to it unless you specifically arranged for a tag or card.

The split: what's typical

Consignment commissions vary by shop and by category, but a 60/40 split in the maker's favor is commonly cited as standard for handmade goods, with anywhere from 50/50 to 70/30 also showing up depending on the shop's overhead and how much selling effort they put in. A shop with a prime downtown location and a lot of foot traffic may hold out for a bigger cut than a small co-op gallery that's really just offering wall or shelf space. Neither number is inherently unfair — it's worth asking upfront rather than assuming, and worth comparing to what you'd actually take home selling the same piece yourself before deciding whether the shop's foot traffic is worth the smaller cut.

What to put in writing before anything leaves your hands

A friendly conversation with a shop owner is a fine start, but consignment specifically benefits from a short written agreement, because the arrangement stretches out over time and a lot can go sideways in the gap between drop-off and payment. Worth covering, even in a one-page agreement:

• The commission split, spelled out as a percentage, along with who sets the retail price the item is sold at.
• Payment terms and frequency — how often the shop settles up (monthly is common), and how, since you shouldn't have to chase down money for something that already sold.
• The length of the agreement, and what happens at the end of it: does unsold work automatically get pulled and returned, or does it silently keep sitting there until you ask?
• Who's responsible if something is damaged, lost, or stolen while it's in the shop's care — and whether the shop's insurance actually covers consigned goods, since it isn't always automatic.
• An inventory list, itemized by piece, so both of you have the same record of exactly what was dropped off and can check it against what sold.
• How restocking and reorders work if a piece does well and the shop wants more.

None of this needs to feel adversarial to ask for. A shop that's run consignment before will usually already have most of this on paper, and a shop that doesn't is telling you something about how organized the arrangement is likely to be.

The real risk: unsold inventory tying up your work

The quiet cost of consignment isn't the commission — it's the pieces that don't sell. Every item sitting in a shop's display case is inventory you can't sell yourself, at your own booth or online, for as long as it's there. If a shop is slow to move your work, or slower still to actually return what didn't sell at the end of the term, that's stock and material cost tied up doing nothing, right through a season when you'd rather have it in front of your own customers.

That's the reason a defined term and a clear return process matter more in a consignment agreement than almost anything else in it. Open-ended consignment — no end date, no obligation to settle up or return unsold work — is the version that quietly costs vendors the most, because there's never a moment that forces a resolution.

Questions worth asking before you say yes

A few questions upfront tend to surface whether a particular consignment offer is a good one:

• How long has the shop been doing consignment, and do they have other makers who'd talk about their experience?
• How often do they actually settle payments, and has that ever slipped?
• What happens to unsold inventory at the end of the term — automatic return, or do you have to ask?
• Is the shop insured for consigned goods, and would they put that in writing?
• Do they photograph and tag your work with your name, or does it blend in anonymously with everything else on the shelf?

A shop that answers plainly and doesn't mind a written agreement is usually a fine bet. Hesitation on any of these is worth taking seriously before your inventory goes out the door.

The bottom line

Consignment isn't a smaller version of wholesale — it's a different deal entirely: the shop takes on no upfront cost, you take on the risk that a piece might sit unsold, and you only get paid once it actually sells. A typical split runs somewhere between 50/50 and 70/30 in the maker's favor, most often cited around 60/40, but the number matters less than having the term, the payment schedule, and the return process for unsold work spelled out before anything leaves your hands. Handled with a clear agreement, it's a reasonable way to get your work in front of customers on days you're not behind a table yourself.

Whether it's a consignment drop-off, a wholesale account, or the next Event on your calendar, it's one more commitment sitting alongside everything else you're already tracking this fall. The Tracker keeps your Shows, deadlines, and booth dates in one place, so a new consignment arrangement doesn't mean losing track of what else is due this season. Artisans Almanac offers a 30-day free trial if you want this fall organized while you weigh a new offer.