STINGER VENUE LAYOUT
Vendor booth layout software
The vendor map most markets still draw on graph paper the night before — except this one fits the roster to a lot somebody actually measured, keeps the food trucks on the edge a truck can reach, and hands you a numbered floor plan you can print.
The survey
How does surveying a lot once save time on every future event there?
Drop an aerial of the lot, tell it the scale, and trace the usable area and anything booths can't sit on — a walkway, a water feature, an activities zone. That becomes a saved venue: name, square footage, which edge trucks drive to, fire-lane width, surface, and power availability. Every future layout at that address reuses those numbers without asking again.
Obstacles & zones
What it doesn't know, it says out loud.
A venue record can be saved without every obstacle confirmed, and the tool says so rather than implying a clearance nobody actually walked: an unchecked "I looked for and drew every obstacle" box carries the warning forward into every layout pulled from that record — light poles, drains, hydrants, planters and low branches stay flagged as unconfirmed until someone attests to them.
The plan
What does the finished vendor layout actually give you?
You give it the roster and the venue's measured usable area. It gives back where every vendor stands — not a suggestion, a position.
Every booth has a number and a spot
Booth 14, forty feet across and twenty-two feet back from the corner of the usable area. Check-in hands someone a number that maps to a real square on the ground, not a wave at a row.
Trucks are placed first
Food trucks and concession trailers go down before anything else, pinned to the edge a truck can actually drive to. A truck that can't reach its pad isn't a layout problem on the morning — it's a cancellation.
Fire clearance is held, not hoped for
A generator tent and a hot-food tent each keep three feet clear on every side. A truck or trailer keeps five, a bounce house six. The fire lane along the drive edge stays empty — twenty feet by default, and it tells you to ask the venue rather than assume.
Nothing sits on an obstacle
Light poles, drains, hydrants, planters, low branches, the stage. Anything recorded in the survey is a hole in the plan, not a square that quietly gets covered.
A floor plan, not a paragraph about one
The plan renders as a drawing — coloured by vendor type, every booth carrying its number, saved as a link you can print or send. If the drawing can't be saved it says so, and the positions are still right.
The roster
Eight kinds of vendor. Eight different footprints.
Mixing them up isn't cosmetic. A food truck on a 10x10 pad blocks a fire lane, and a generator tent packed tight against its neighbour is how a marshal shuts a row down.
Standard 10x10 tent
Vendor brings the tent, tables, chairs and signage. Lights mandatory, battery or solar. Tent weights minimum 40 lbs per leg. Ready by 2:45.
Double booth, 10x20
Twenty across by ten deep — and pre-approval required, because 10x10 is the standard unless it's been agreed.
Tent with a generator or heater
Ten by ten with three feet clear on every side, so exhaust and heat stay off the neighbouring canopy. Generator needs pre-approval, tagged extinguisher on site, ready for fire inspection by 2:00.
Hot food tent
Ten by ten with three feet clear. Cooking equipment means a tagged extinguisher, and it's in place ready to inspect by 1:45.
Food truck
Ten wide, and the length is whatever that truck actually is — they run sixteen to thirty-four feet. Five feet clear, on the driveable edge, inspected by 1:45.
Concession trailer
Eight by twenty, five feet clear, driveable edge — and the tow vehicle needs a detach-and-park plan, which is a question on intake rather than a surprise at the gate.
Organizer tent
Your own tent — check-in, info, first aid, staff. It goes up before vendor load-in and gets its own zone with patron-facing frontage near the entrance, instead of competing for vendor space.
Activity or bounce house
Twenty by twenty with six feet clear for anchoring and a fall zone, kept off the lines patrons walk.
The zones
Trucks along the road. Tents in the field. Bounce house in the corner.
That is how an organiser lays out a market in their head, so that is how you draw it — regions on the aerial, each one told what belongs in it, instead of one auto-filled block.
Draw the box, say what goes in it
Tents, food trucks, cooking and generator, activities, organizer, or anything. Vendors shelf-pack inside their own zone, each one spaced by the clearance its type requires.
Turn a box to fit the property
Each zone carries its own angle, so a truck row can follow an angled road while the tent field stays square. Rotating is visual — a rigid turn preserves distance, so no measurement moves.
A specific zone beats a catch-all
A craft tent lands in the tent zone, not in the "anything" zone that happened to be drawn first.
Nothing spills, nothing is dropped
A vendor with no matching zone, or one that won't fit the zone it belongs to, comes back unplaced with the reason. It is never quietly set down outside its box — a booth outside its zone is a vendor standing in a fire lane on event morning.
The survey
Walk the lot once. Never measure it again.
Nobody standing in a parking lot has a 200-foot tape. Everybody running a market knows what a 10x10 tent looks like — so say "20 tents" and it reads 200 feet. Feet, yards, metres and paces work too.
Measured in tent-lengths
Pace it if you'd rather, but a pace is assumed at 2.5 feet until you calibrate your stride against a tent — and it says so, because a stride guessed six inches wrong is ten feet of error over twenty paces.
"No obstacles" and "didn't check" are different answers
Storing them the same way is how a tent ends up assigned on top of a drain. A survey starts unconfirmed and warns on every layout built from it until somebody says they actually looked.
What gets written down
The usable rectangle — not the whole property. Which edge a truck can reach. Every obstacle, positioned from the bottom-left corner. Surface: asphalt, concrete, grass or gravel, because staking and weights differ. Whether there's power. How deep the fire lane needs to be. Who surveyed it, and when.
The next layout doesn't ask twice
Plan a layout for a venue that's already surveyed and it uses the saved dimensions, obstacles, fire lane and drive edge without asking for any of them. Check the list of surveyed venues before you send anyone out with a tape.
It refuses a number it doubts
A side under fifteen feet or over two thousand comes back as a question, not a saved venue. A bad venue size is silently wrong in every layout built on top of it afterwards.
The capacity figure is a ceiling, not an inventory
A surveyed venue shows a rough tent count. It ignores obstacles, aisles and clearances, and it is never the number of booths you can sell.
The aerial
Trace the lot from above, then set it down in feet.
Type the address
The satellite view loads already framed and already scaled — no screenshot to take, no scale line to draw by hand.
Or bring your own image
Drop or paste an aerial and set the scale yourself. Nothing is uploaded until you save the venue.
Level an angled lot first
Turn the image until the usable area is square to the screen, then trace it. The rotation is visual only and doesn't touch the scale.
Draw the area, then the things in it
Outline where tents can actually stand, mark everything they can't sit on, and it becomes the saved venue. Skip the scale and it won't let you save.
The aerial is not the ground
The scale is computed from the map rather than guessed, but an aerial can be a season out of date. The tool says so, and the answer is still to check on site.
The vendor list
Send the spreadsheet you already have.
Most organisers keep vendors in three places at once — an application form, a mailing list, and a long BCC field. Nobody is going to retype hundreds of them.
It reads your column names
Application-form question text, a mailing-list export, or whatever got typed into a spreadsheet that day. It matches the headers you already use.
Three buckets, and you hear all three counts
Imported, needs review, rejected — with the reason on every row that isn't clean. An importer that quietly discards five percent of a roster is worse than one that refuses the file.
It will not guess a vendor type
A guessed type puts a food truck on a 10x10 tent pad, and that gets discovered on event morning with vendors already arriving. A row it can't read is held back, not placed.
The insurance read comes with it
Expired certificates, ones expiring soon, ones missing entirely, and the ones that don't name the organiser as additionally insured.
The handoff
Composed first. Sent on a second click.
You read the packet before it leaves
The first click writes the email to the venue or organiser and shows it to you. Only the second one sends it. An email to somebody else's client cannot be unsent.
The vendors who didn't fit are named in it
Placed vendors listed by booth number, unplaced ones listed by name as still needing a pitch. Silence about a vendor who didn't fit is how someone arrives to nowhere to park.
The drawing goes with the email
The marked-up layout is attached as an image. A floor plan described in prose is useless at seven in the morning on a field.
What it doesn't do
It can't see your site. It says so instead of guessing.
No measurements, no layout
It does not read a map or a satellite image to work out a venue's dimensions on its own. Without a measured width and depth it refuses and asks for them — a layout drawn on a guessed size is confidently wrong on the one morning nobody can fix it.
If they don't fit, it names them
Vendors that don't fit come back listed, with the choices spelled out: shrink the roster, enlarge the boundary, or reduce the fire lane. It does not quietly overlap them to make the number work.
An unmeasured truck warns, out loud
With no measured length on file it uses a 26-foot default and flags it, and that flag is repeated to you rather than buried at the bottom of a plan.
Address lookup needs a connected map account
The address-to-aerial step runs on a map token you add in settings. Until it's there it tells you it isn't connected, rather than returning a picture of somewhere else. Tracing your own screenshot needs nothing connected at all.
Parcel and ownership lookup isn't built
It's offered in the toolbox and it refuses when asked, by name. A parcel search that answers "nothing found" for an address that plainly exists is worse than one that admits it was never wired up.
Why it holds
The rules aren't invented, and they aren't on the honour system.
The requirements came out of a real vendor packet
The footprints, the clearances, the 1:45 and 2:00 inspection deadlines, the 40 lbs per leg, the no-early-breakdown rule and the $50 cleanup fee are lifted from a working Port St. Lucie market operator's own brief to their vendors — not from a guess about what a market needs.
Twenty tests hold the rules down
No two booths overlap. Nothing lands on an obstacle. Every booth stays inside the boundary. Vehicle vendors sit on the drive edge. Generator and food booths keep their clearance. An impossible roster is refused instead of stacked. Each of those is an assertion that runs, not an intention.
Nothing here is waiting on somebody else
The layout engine is geometry — a boundary, obstacles, a fire lane and a packer — with no external dependency and no credentials to obtain. It cannot be blocked waiting on a vendor to grant access.
Related
Part of the same operations platform.
Venue Layout runs on the same console as the trade platforms — see Pool Construction and Pool Service for job-site management, or the full platform overview for how every module connects.