The holiday-season question every maker asks in the same week
Is it too late to make this?
The Maker’s Holiday-Season Production & Market Planner answers it: a spreadsheet that works back from each carrier’s published holiday cutoff to the day each product has to be finished, and does the same arithmetic for the materials you have to order, the discounts you can afford and the stock a craft fair takes with it.
You know the shipping cutoff is somewhere around the middle of December. You know the soap needs a month to cure and the candles do not. You know the jar supplier takes three weeks. Somewhere in the middle of those three facts is a date — the last day you can still finish a batch of that particular product and have it reach someone in time — and by hand it means working that date out once per product, per carrier.
The planner does that arithmetic. It starts from each carrier’s published cutoff, subtracts transit to get a ship-by date, subtracts your handling and packing days to get a pack-by date, and subtracts that product’s own cure and finish time to reach the day the making has to be finished. The days remaining count down from today, every time you open the file.
What it computes that a blank spreadsheet will not
A make-by date, per product
A make-by date is the last day a product can be finished and still reach a buyer in time — the carrier’s cutoff, less transit, less packing, less that product’s own cure or finish time.
Eleven shipping rows ship pre-filled — ten carrier services plus your own local pickup or market handover — each editable and carrying the year its cutoff was published for. Under the carrier table, a per-product block takes the service you plan to use and gives every product in your catalog its own deadline. In the worked example those dates spread from mid November to mid December — a month that a single date for the whole shop would hide entirely.
The discount floor: the largest discount a product can survive
Every planned promotion is priced against unit cost, your channel’s transaction and processing fees, the listing fee, the postage you absorb and your ad spend. Out of that comes the maximum discount before contribution goes negative, and the maximum that still hits your target margin. A flat “30% off everything” treats a high-margin candle and a bulky gift set as the same thing; this tab shows you exactly where that assumption breaks.
An order-by date for every material
An order-by date is the last day an order can be placed and still arrive before the week the material is needed.
A 57-line bill of materials says what one of each product consumes. The season’s units explode through it into quantities, a waste buffer is added, what is on the shelf is netted out, the remainder is rounded up to whole packs — and then the week you first need it, minus that supplier’s own lead time, gives the last safe day to place the order.
Whether you can build the season in the hours you have
Seventeen weeks on an editable demand curve, converted into making hours at your own per-product times, and set against the hours you realistically have. Weeks that ask for more than you can give are flagged in September, when you can still move work, rather than in December, when you cannot — the holiday production capacity check is the same arithmetic done by hand.
What a craft-fair day really leaves you
Booth fee, travel, per-day table costs and card fees against the contribution an average sale returns: break-even in units, how much stock to bring, and a verdict on the event. Stock committed to a fair is netted back out of what is free to sell online, which is the double-sell that catches makers running a shop and three December markets at once.
It opens on a worked holiday season, not an empty grid
Ten products, twenty materials, seven markets, nine promotions and a 1,831-unit forecast are already filled in, with three over-capacity weeks, three below-cost promotions and one loss-making event flagged — so you can see what every warning looks like before you clear the example and type your own. The sample business is a coined one, not a customer.
Nothing in it is locked
No sheet protection, no password, no hidden formulas and no hidden tabs. The currency symbol and every channel fee rate are fields on the Setup tab rather than assumptions buried in the formulas, and one season-year field drives every derived date in the file, so nothing expires the moment the year turns.
About the carrier dates
The ten seeded services are US ones — USPS, UPS and FedEx — and they ship as those carriers’ published 2025 dates wherever a carrier publishes one, each carrier row labeled with the year it came from, and the workbook projects the day and month onto your season year, so no date on the tab expires with a past year. The eleventh row is not a carrier at all, but your own local-pickup or market-handover day. Four rows are not a single flat date: UPS Ground varies by origin and destination and FedEx Ground is published per transit band, so both are seeded at the conservative end; USPS Ground Advantage closes a day earlier for Alaska, Hawaii and the territories; and Priority Mail International closes earlier again for Central and South America. They are planning estimates, not guarantees, and the rows are ordinary editable ones: replace them with your own carrier’s — anywhere in the world — and check each against its current schedule every September. Ardent Workshop is not affiliated with USPS, UPS or FedEx.
Own it, don’t rent it
Buy it once and the file is yours — on your machine, in your account, working the same way next December. Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice, no seats, no renewal and no account to keep.
If your season grows past what one workbook comfortably holds and you want inventory, purchases and sales tracked continuously rather than planned a season at a time, Ardent Seller (opens in new tab) is the app we build for that. The workbook stays yours either way.
