Every studio owner has had the Saturday where three tables sat empty. Not because nobody wanted them — they were booked. The people just didn't come. You had staff on, you had bisque out, and you had nothing to show for it. And because the booking was free to make, it was free to break.
Taking a deposit is the obvious answer, and it is the one most people flinch at. It feels like putting a barrier in front of a customer who was about to give you money. So we went and measured what it actually does.
We went back through every paint-your-own booking on CollectIt with a session date between 2 April and 10 November 2026 — 5,914 bookings and 16,133 painters across nine independent studios in different towns, with different customers and no connection to one another. Four of them ask for money at the point of booking. Five do not. One changed its mind partway through, which turned out to be one of the most useful things in the whole dataset.
The Headline
We counted a booking as lost if it was cancelled or the customer never turned up. From the studio's point of view those are the same event: a table you held and could not sell.
Put in the language of a normal week: for every hundred bookings you take without asking for anything, about fifteen fall through. Ask for a fiver a head and it is closer to two.
Is It Just One Studio Skewing It?
Fair question. In September, when we first looked, only two studios were asking for money and one of them had only just started. Now four are, and here is every studio separately.
| Studio | What it asks for | Lost, payment taken | Lost, nothing taken |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | £5 a head deposit, switched on in August | 1.8% (546) | 26.6% (361, before the switch) |
| B | £5 a head studio fee | 1.1% (789) | 9.7% (62) |
| C | £5 a head deposit | 3.2% (248) | — |
| D | About £4 a head deposit | 4.5% (244) | 30.3% (33) |
| E | £18 a head, parties of 7+ only | 9.4% (32) | 14.5% (2,756) |
| F | Nothing (a deposit on a handful) | 5.6% (18) | 11.5% (608) |
| G | Nothing | — | 16.1% (31) |
| H | Nothing | — | 11.2% (134) |
| I | Nothing | — | 6.0% (50) |
The pattern is hard to miss. Every studio that asks for a small payment loses fewer bookings than every studio that asks for nothing: between 1.1% and 4.5% against between 6% and 16%. Studio E, which asks for a much larger deposit but only on parties of seven or more, is a different story, and we will come back to it.
Did It Hold Up?
The first version of this analysis stopped on 3 September. The fair test of any finding is whether it survives new data, so we looked at the bookings since then on their own: two months of sessions the original numbers never saw.
Same shape, same size of gap. It held.
It Is Not the Money. It Is the Moment.
The obvious theory is that a deposit works because people do not want to lose the money. If that were the whole story, £18 would work far better than £5. It does not.
What a payment really does is turn a browsing decision into a committed one. You have got your card out. You have checked with whoever you are bringing. The booking has become a plan rather than an intention.
The strongest evidence for that is what happens as bookings are made further ahead:
Book someone in for tomorrow with no deposit and 10.4% of those bookings evaporate. Book them in a fortnight out and it is 20.3% — a booking made two weeks ahead is twice as likely to disappear as one made tomorrow. That fits what we found when we looked at booking windows: the further ahead someone books, the more time there is for something better to come along.
Now look at the paid bookings. They sit between 1.1% and 4.5% no matter how far ahead they were made. The payment removes the decay. That is the mechanism, and it is why a small amount is enough.
What Happened When One Studio Switched It On
The cleanest test in the data is Studio A, which ran with no deposit at all and then turned on £5 a head partway through August. Same studio, same session type, same town, same customers.
That looks like a twenty-nine point improvement, and we do not think it is. Here is the honest version.
The other two studios in the same weeks also improved without changing anything at all — one went from 18.7% to 12.7%, the other from 18.8% to 5.3%. That is the school holidays ending. Holiday bookings are flakier everywhere. If you subtract that background improvement from Studio A's figure, the change attributable to the deposit is around nineteen percentage points rather than twenty-nine.
Nineteen points is still an enormous number. On a studio taking forty bookings a week, that is roughly seven and a half bookings a week that now turn up and previously did not. It is just not the twenty-nine the raw before-and-after suggests, and we would rather give you the figure that will hold up.
Deposit or Studio Fee? Both Work.
The studios charging around £5 a head do it in two different ways, and this is worth knowing because the objection most owners raise is about refunds and awkward conversations.
Most take it as a deposit, held against the booking and taken off the bill on the day. Studio B charges £5 a head as a studio fee, paid in full at the point of booking. It is not a deposit at all. It is the bench fee, collected up front, and the customer pays for their pottery on the day as normal.
| Model | Bookings | Cancelled |
|---|---|---|
| Held as a deposit | 1,088 | 2.5% |
| Charged as a studio fee | 789 | 1.1% |
| Nothing taken | 4,037 | 12.9% |
Both are a world away from taking nothing. The studio fee comes out slightly ahead, but that is one studio against several, so we would not read much into the difference. The choice is genuinely yours, and you can pick the one that suits how you talk to your customers.
The studio fee has one practical advantage worth flagging: there is no refund question to manage, because nothing is being held. The customer has bought their studio time, the same way they would buy a cinema ticket. That framing lands well with customers and it is simpler for your staff. The deposit model, on the other hand, feels gentler on the booking page — the money comes off the bill, so nobody is paying anything extra overall.
Charge for the Risk, Not for the Booking
Now back to Studio E. They ask for £18 a head, but only from parties of seven or more. Those bookings still fell through 9.4% of the time, against 14.5% for their other bookings. Better, but nowhere near the drop the £5 studios see.
Big group bookings are simply flakier. Across every studio, parties of seven or more with nothing taken fell through 26% of the time, and even with a payment taken it was 7.5%. A party of ten is ten people's diaries, a birthday that can move, and an organiser who has to herd everyone. No deposit fixes that completely.
But look at what the deposit is doing instead. When one of those bookings fell through, the studio was not left with nothing — it was holding £126 or more. Across all the studios, bookings that fell apart after a payment had been taken had £320 of it retained rather than lost.
This is the distinction worth carrying away. On a normal two- or three-person booking, a small payment is a deterrent — it stops the booking falling through in the first place. On a large party, a bigger deposit is protection — it will not always stop the cancellation, but it means the Saturday afternoon you held open still paid you something. Different jobs. Size the payment to the risk you are actually carrying.
In practice that means something like: a few pounds a head on ordinary sessions, and a proper deposit on parties, workshops and anything where you are turning other trade away to hold the space.
What This Is Costing You
Across the studios taking nothing at booking, 1,593 painters did not arrive over seven months. We are deliberately not going to turn that into a headline pound figure, because average spend varies far too much between studios for our number to mean anything at yours.
Do it with your own instead. Take your average spend per painter and multiply:
- 📉Roughly 15 in every 100 bookings lost with nothing taken, against about 2 in 100 with a payment. That is thirteen bookings back per hundred.
- 👥Those thirteen bookings are around 2.7 painters each on average across our studios.
- 💷So per hundred bookings you take, a £5 charge is worth roughly thirty-five painters' worth of trade — multiplied by whatever a painter spends with you.
One caveat we want to be straight about: not every cancellation is money lost. A booking cancelled ten days out can be resold. A no-show at two o'clock on a Saturday cannot. At the studios taking nothing, 70% of cancellations arrived inside 48 hours, which is not much time to fill a table — but it is not zero either. Treat the figure above as the size of the opportunity rather than a cheque you are going to cash in full.
“Won't It Put People Off?”
This is the real worry, it is the reason most studios never try it, and we are not going to pretend our data settles it. This is the weakest part of the picture and you should know that before you act on any of it.
Here is what we can see. In the fortnight before Studio A turned the deposit on they took 340 bookings. In the fortnight after, 187. Painters who actually walked through the door went from 608 to 475. Over the same two fortnights, one comparison studio was almost flat, down 5%, and the other was up 69%.
Taken at face value that says the deposit cost them bookings. We do not think you should take it at face value, for one specific reason: that first fortnight was Studio A's first fortnight. They had just opened their books, and a studio's launch weeks carry a surge that fades whatever they charge. We cannot separate the deposit from the novelty wearing off, and we are not going to guess.
So the honest summary is this. Of the bookings that were made, far more turned up, and that part we measured properly against studios that changed nothing. Whether the total number of bookings goes up or down is a question this data cannot answer. Any software company that tells you a deposit definitely grows your bookings is guessing.
If you do try it, watch your booking volume for a month and not just your no-show rate. If the phone goes quiet, you will want to know it was the deposit and not the season.
How to Set It Up
- 💷Start at £5 a head. It is enough. The data gives you no reason to ask for more on ordinary sessions, and the smaller the number, the easier the conversation.
- 🧾Decide deposit or studio fee. Take it off the bill on the day, or charge it as bench time and let them pay for pottery separately. Both performed the same. Pick whichever you would rather explain.
- 🎉Set a bigger deposit on parties. You can apply a deposit only above a certain party size. That is where the real money sits and where a cancellation hurts most.
- 💬Say why on the booking page. “A £5 per person deposit secures your table and comes off your bill on the day” does the whole job. Customers are used to this everywhere else they book.
BookIt takes the payment for you, at the moment of booking.
CollectIt's BookIt feature can take a deposit or a studio fee per person, apply it only above a party size you choose, and credit it against the bill on the day — with no chasing, no card machine, and no awkward conversation.
See How BookIt Works →How We Did This
- 📊Every paint-your-own booking taken through CollectIt with a session date between 2 April and 10 November 2026: 5,914 bookings and 16,133 painters, across the nine independent studios with at least thirty paint-your-own bookings in the period. Smaller studios are excluded because their numbers are too thin to mean anything. Workshops, courses, parties and private hire are excluded too, so we are comparing like with like.
- 🚶Walk-ins are excluded. They are recorded after the customer has already arrived, so they cannot cancel and would flatter any studio that logs a lot of them. So are online bookings abandoned at the payment page, which never became bookings at all.
- 📅A booking counts as lost if it was cancelled or marked a no-show. Two studios rarely use check-in, so for them we assumed every booking not cancelled did turn up. One of them takes a payment on almost every booking, so this flatters the paid side slightly. Leaving both studios out entirely gives 3.0% against 15.1%: the same story.
- 🔁This is an update. The first version covered 2 April to 3 September. Everything since then is new data, and on its own it shows the same gap: 2.7% against 13.0%.
- ⚖️All the studios improved as the summer holidays ended, so when one studio switched deposits on in August we compared it against two that changed nothing over the same weeks. The nineteen-point figure is after that adjustment. The raw before-and-after was twenty-nine points, and we think that overstates it.
- ❓We can measure what happened to the bookings that were made. We cannot measure the customer who saw a deposit and closed the tab, so nothing here proves a deposit grows your total bookings. At the one studio where we could look at volume it fell, in a fortnight that was also their launch fortnight, so that result is unusable either way.
- 🔍Some cells are still small: Studio E's party deposits are 32 bookings, and only 53 large-party bookings had a payment taken anywhere. The overall pattern is consistent across studios, across every booking window and across the new data, which is why we are confident in the direction even where we are not confident in the decimal place.
If you run a studio and want to know your own numbers, they are in your Insights page — no analysis required. And if yours look very different from these, we would genuinely like to hear about it.