The hardest hour of a wedding evening is the one after guests arrive and before dinner opens. Everyone has greeted whoever they came to greet. The music is playing to nobody in particular. People check their phones.
A stall fills that hour better than almost anything else, because it gives people three things at once: somewhere to walk to, something to watch, and a reason to talk to the person next to them in the queue.
But most advice about wedding stalls is written by people who have never run one, so it treats them as interchangeable. They are not. The difference that matters is throughput — how many guests one artist can get through in an hour — and it varies by a factor of five.
Start with the arithmetic, not the aesthetics
Take your guest count. Assume roughly 60% of guests will actually use a stall — some will not be interested, some will be eating, some will be dancing. Divide by the number of hours the stall will run. That is the per-hour rate you need.
A 400-guest wedding with a three-hour slot needs about 80 guests an hour served. Now compare that against what each stall can actually do.
Photo magnet stall
60 to 70 an hour, per artist. The highest throughput of anything we run, because the bottleneck is a printer rather than a person.
Two artists clears about 130 an hour, which covers a 400-guest wedding comfortably. Four artists clears a 700-guest wedding. This is the only stall type that reliably gets a souvenir into most hands at a large Indian wedding, which is why it is the one we book most.
The queue moves visibly, which matters more than it sounds — a queue that crawls makes people leave it.
Live caricature artist
12 to 15 an hour, per artist. Roughly a fifth of the magnet rate.
This is not a flaw, it is a different product. Nobody books a caricature artist to process guests. They book one because a crowd forms behind the chair and stays there, watching a drawing appear. It is entertainment that happens to produce a souvenir, rather than a souvenir production line.
The mistake is booking a single caricature artist for a 500-guest wedding and expecting everyone to get one. In three hours that artist will produce about forty drawings. Forty out of five hundred guests will be delighted; the other four hundred and sixty will have watched a queue they could not join.
At scale, book a caricature artist alongside a high-throughput stall, not instead of one.
Candy bar
Continuous, no real queue. A different shape entirely — people help themselves, so there is no per-hour ceiling.
The thing worth knowing: an unstaffed candy table looks wonderful for twenty minutes and picked-over for the rest of the night. If you are doing this, it needs somebody behind it refilling jars for the whole slot, or it will be the saddest corner of your reception by 10pm.
Best at functions with a lot of children, and at daytime events.
Keychain stall
45 to 55 an hour, per artist. Slightly slower than magnets, cheaper per piece.
Better than magnets for a younger crowd, because a keychain goes on a bag where other people see it. Worse for an older crowd, who will put it in a drawer. For a wedding with a wide age range, magnets win; for a sangeet with a mostly-under-30 guest list, keychains are the better call.
The two mistakes that cost the most
Under-booking the count. A stall that runs dry an hour before the evening ends looks worse than no stall at all, and it is always a booking decision rather than a crew problem. Give your vendor a real guest count, not an optimistic one.
Putting it in a corner. A stall placed where guests do not already walk gets used by the people who happen to find it. Place it on the route between the entrance and the dining area, or beside the bar. Floor plan matters more than the stall itself.
What to ask a vendor before booking
Five questions, and any competent vendor will answer all five without hesitating:
- How many pieces per hour, per artist?
- How many crew are included at that price?
- How much floor space, and how many power sockets?
- How long before guest entry do you need the venue floor?
- What happens if a printer fails halfway through?
If a vendor cannot give you a number for the first one, they have not run enough events to know it. That is the answer to your question.