June 20, 2026
Why I Built Canopy Season
Every vendor I know has a spreadsheet.
Mine had columns for event name, dates, booth fee, application deadline, whether I'd applied, whether I'd heard back, and a notes field that mostly said things like "ask about electricity" or "2024 was slow, skip?" It lived in a folder next to a browser window with fourteen tabs open, because that's what it takes to plan a season. Every tab was a different organizer's website, and every website buried the one thing I actually needed.
That's the part people outside this world don't understand. Vending isn't hard because the work is hard — the work is the fun part. Vending is hard because the information you need to make good decisions is scattered across a thousand websites that were never designed to give it to you.
The problem is information, not motivation
Here's a typical craft fair listing, as it exists on the internet today: a beautiful photo of last year's event, a paragraph about community and local makers, a date that may or may not be current, and a link labeled "Vendors" that goes to a page that either 404s, points at a PDF from two years ago, or dumps you into a third-party application portal that asks you to create an account before it will tell you the booth fee.
The booth fee is the whole question. So is the deadline. So is whether the event takes a percentage of your sales on top of the fee, whether load-in is at 7 a.m., whether there's a commission, whether it's juried, whether anyone actually bought anything last year.
Vendors solve this the slow way. We talk to each other, at every show. We ask around in Facebook groups. We text the friend who did that show in 2023. We find an aggregator site that lists the event but got the date wrong. We apply late because the deadline was published somewhere we never thought to look. And then we hand over a few hundred dollars for a weekend that we're genuinely not sure will break even.
I did that for years. At some point it stopped feeling like a personal organizational failure and started feeling like a missing piece of infrastructure.
Everyone was building for the other side
There's real software in this space. It's just pointed the wrong direction. The tools that exist are built for organizers — application management, payment processing, jury workflows, vendor rosters. Which makes sense, because organizers have budgets and vendors have a folding table and a card reader.
But that means the person taking on the financial risk — the maker writing the check, driving three hours, and hoping the weather holds — has the worst information in the transaction. The organizer knows what the event is. The vendor is guessing.
Canopy Season exists to close that gap. It's a directory built for the vendor side of the table.
What it actually does
You search for events by state, by type, by season. You get the details that matter: dates, booth fees where we can confirm them, application deadlines, and a direct link to the actual application — not a homepage you have to spelunk through. Listings are verified and date-stamped, so you can see when a piece of information was last confirmed instead of trusting a page that might be three years stale.
On top of that:
Deadline reminders, so an application window doesn't close while you're busy making inventory.
A cost calculator that adds up the real expense of a weekend — fees, travel, materials, food, the hours — and tells you your true hourly rate. It is frequently sobering. That's the point.
Vendor reviews, because the only honest source on an event is the person who packed up at the end of it.
There are currently more than 8,000 events in the database across all fifty states, D.C., and Puerto Rico, and the number goes up every week.
Built by a vendor, which is the only reason it works
I'm a designer by trade and an artist and illustrator by soul, and I sell at markets regularly. That's not a marketing line—it's the reason the data model has a field for commission structure and the reason the cost calculator asks about parking. I knew what to ask because I’ve been burned by not knowing.
I built this alone, in Seattle, over the course of about a year, and launched it in June. It is not finished. Directories are never finished; that's the nature of the thing. But it's live, it's growing, and it does the job I needed done since I started prepping for my first day vending.
If you sell at markets: I built this for you. Come use it.
